Open Encyclopedia of Anthropology - Work & Labour

Work/labour

Rebecca Tishler — Mon, 01 Jul 2024 14:09:10 +0000

Women farmers plow fields in preparation to plant corn in Gnoungouya Village, Guinea on June 15, 2015. Photo by World Bank Photo collection.

Jasmine Folz Rachel Smith

University of Manchester, University of Aberdeen

Initially published 1 Jul 2024

http://doi.org/10.29164/24worklabour

Abstract:

Most of our lives are spent working, as we frequently engage in purposeful activity to build and maintain our physical and social worlds. The anthropology of work and labour provides a comparative perspective on how people make a living within their natural and social environments, while bringing into focus how people everywhere are interconnected and impacted through global historical processes. Its history and theoretical purchase have been shaped by theoretical shifts within the discipline and by wider political-economic transformations. This overview traces these shifts and begins by discussing how early ethnographic fieldwork helped to overturn Eurocentric assumptions about work. The anthropology of work and labour helped criticize theories of social evolution, but in the process, it often excluded the impacts of colonialism and capitalism on people’s lives. It also developed the idea of the division of labour to understand and critique how different forms of labour are allocated and valorised. From the mid-twentieth century, anthropologists increasingly developed a critical perspective on capitalism, its alternatives, and its consequences. A major contribution of the anthropology of work and labour is that it elucidated perspectives and experiences of people in the peripheries and margins of capitalism. Research into work in industrial centres has clarified the ways in which industrial processes have played out in different regions and political-economic contexts as well as how power is accrued and maintained by elites and professionals. The entry concludes by highlighting key anthropological contributions to understandings of work and labour during the contemporary era, often referred to as ‘late capitalism’.

Introduction

What is considered ‘work’ or not work (play, leisure) varies culturally and historically, and may not be separable as a discrete domain vis-à-vis domestic life, ritual, and religion (Applebaum 1992; Wallmann 1979; Gamst 1995). If a corresponding term for ‘work’ is identifiable, it may carve out a different sphere of human activity from that denoted in English, or be accorded different kinds of value(s) (e.g. Povinelli 1993; Strathern 1982). While definitions of work differ historically and cross-culturally, everywhere activities that could be described as work or labour are frequent and socially necessary domains of human^[1] activity. Consequently, attention to work and labour is important and useful for comparative purposes, and for thinking through how people are interconnected across the globe (Narotzky 2018).

In the English language, the terms ‘labour’ and ‘work’ are often interchangeable, but they also carry different connotations. ‘Work’ tends to cover a more diverse range of purposeful activities including gainful employment, voluntary and community service, crafts and creative activities, domestic and subsistence tasks. ‘Labour’, by contrast, more often describes physical toil, performed out of necessity, coercion, or domination (Gamst 1995; Wallman 1979, 1). It can be argued that anthropology reflects the same divergent tendencies in the differential valorisation of work and labour. While anthropology of work has often encompassed a wide variety of ways in which people transform social and natural environments and the meanings and values they accord to these activities, the term ‘labour’ has more often been used by anthropologists influenced by the writings of Karl Marx who interrogate work through the lens of labour exploitation and class struggle.

The anthropology of work and labour as an organised subdiscipline can be traced from the late 1970s, with themed publications (e.g. Burawoy 1979a; Nash and Fernandez Kelly 1983; Wallman 1979), and the founding of the Society for the Anthropology of Work in 1980, which publishes the Anthropology of Work Review. Interest in work and labour waned through the 1990s and early 2000s, as part of a ‘postmodern turn’ in anthropology which distanced itself from Marxian concepts such as labour, class, and capitalism. However, there has been a resurgence in recent years. In 2018, the European Association of Social Anthropologists (EASA) ‘Anthropology of Labour Network’ was established, and since then there has been a proliferation of publications on work and labour (e.g. Graeber 2018; Harvey and Krohn-Hansen 2018; Kasmir and Gill 2022; Lazar 2023).

This overview approaches the anthropology of work and labour by tracing how it has responded to shifting political and economic contexts and disciplinary concerns. The entry first examines how anthropologists have situated work within a comparative study of different cultures and societies. It then discusses how the division of labour is a useful comparative frame to understand how different forms of work are allocated and valorised differently across sociocultural contexts. Subsequent sections discuss how ethnographic studies have elucidated the expansion of capitalism, its uneven effects, and on-going transformations. These sections highlight that the anthropology of work can reveal the often-neglected lived experiences of people on the frontiers and margins of capitalism. The entry then explores how industrialisation gave rise to profound global shifts in forms of work and labour relations, but also wrought vast socioeconomic consequences. It concludes with a discussion of renewed interest in the on-going transformations, meanings, and values of work in contemporary life in the context of late capitalism.

Foundational approaches

Early anthropology tended to focus on questions of work and livelihood in what is often termed ‘preindustrial’ or ‘non-market’ societies. In the nineteenth century, anthropologists and ethnologists such as Lewis Henry Morgan and Herbert Spencer propounded theories of social evolution. They often focussed on technological developments as a way of classifying societies into stages and ranking them from a ‘primitive’ original state through to ‘civilised’ (read: white, European) societies. The emphasis was less on work as a social process and more on technological and material differences as evidence of social evolution.

The early twentieth century saw a shift away from this evolutionary emphasis on material technology, as well as conjectures about the origins of man, to a focus on empirical field research. Franz Boas developed the theory of Historical Particularism^[2] as a critique of social evolution theories. Bronislaw Malinowski (1925) also derided the emphasis on material culture of nineteenth-century ethnologists. Contrary to their assumptions he showed that labour in small-scale societies (deemed ‘primitive labour’ at the time) was neither unorganized nor lacking in sophistication. Malinowski argued instead that work should be understood as part of an integrated social system, regulated by gender, kinship, and ritual norms and roles. He was deeply interested in the question, ‘what motivates people to undergo often arduous unpleasant periods of labour?’ (1925, 927); a question he inherited from a long-standing German intellectual tradition (Hann 2021; Spittler 2008; Smith 2024). This interest would culminate in his two volume book Coral Gardens and their magic ([1935] 1965), which provided a detailed account of early 20th century Trobriand agricultural methods. The book continues to be influential, illustrating that even seemingly simple forms of agriculture do not follow automatically from peoples’ ecological conditions. Instead, it highlights that people’s work is deeply influenced by local politics and customs, as well as understandings of magic and kinship. Malinowski’s student, Audrey Richards, was also a key early figure in the anthropology of work, publishing two books on the subject. She initially theorised that ‘biological instincts’, especially hunger, were key drivers for work (1932; see 1939, viii). However, she would later overturn her ideas and argue that custom and institutions shape incentives to work, which in turn influence diet and appetite (1939).

Even when questions of work were not the main focus of ethnographies, they often described in great detail how a given society organised its social and material resources to meet its needs. This is true for ‘functionalist’ and ‘structural-functionalist’ works, i.e. works which ask how individuals and social institutions allow people to meet their needs, including how they maintain social cohesion. For instance, Edward Evans-Pritchard provided a detailed account of cattle-rearing practices among the Nuer in Sudan during the 1930s. He suggested that the Nuer’s social and political system at the time could only be understood in relation to their prevailing mode of livelihood, and relationship with their environment (1940, 4). The Nuer, Evans-Pritchard argued, depended on cattle for many of life’s necessities, and their love of cattle and desire to acquire them shaped not just their work, but also their relations with neighbouring peoples, their ritual lives, and their understandings of personhood.

The early twentieth century saw a theoretical shift from evolutionary to more comparative and relativist anthropological analyses. Yet, a lingering underlying assumption that societies could be ordered according to their predominant mode of livelihood persisted. It often implied a transition from hunter-gather or foraging societies, to farming and agriculture, and finally a ‘modern’ industrial society, based on waged employment. Proponents of cultural ecology and neo-evolutionary theories of culture in mid-century American anthropology offered materialist explanations for cultural change (e.g. Steward 1955; White 1943). They emphasised how labour and technology are applied to exploit a given environment. While neither of these theories survived the test of time intact, their materialism significantly influenced later generations of anthropologists who relied more explicitly on the work of Marx. Following Marx, these studies held that economic, material, and technological relations could determine how work was organized, and classified societies accordingly, for example into being pre-capitalist, feudal, capitalist or communist (Bruun and Wahlberg 2022).

The debates which animated early anthropological theorising about work and labour are on-going, and anthropologists continue to dispel the common assumption that modes of subsistence and division of labour can be ordered into progressive temporal stages. For instance, the proposition that technological developments led to less time spent on production would be challenged by the much-debated argument that hunter-gatherers were in fact more ‘time affluent’ than people of modern industrial societies (Sahlins’ ([1972] 1976; Bird-David 1982; Kaplan 2000). Anthropologists have also argued that there may be no universal trajectory from farm-based or otherwise ‘traditional’ livelihoods into a seemingly natural endpoint of salaried wage labour. They came to this conclusion by documenting the rise and importance of ‘informal’ and highly precarious jobs around the world over the past decades (Ferguson and Li 2018). In working with archaeologists, anthropologists have also shown that human freedom and creativity may be the governing features of socio-cultural change, rather than access to land and calories (e.g. Graeber and Wengrow 2021). Recent publications continue to emphasise anthropology’s potential for highlighting and critiquing the frequently Eurocentric and teleological narratives of progress and development.

While anthropology has successfully challenged many grand but often stereotypical narratives, such as the assumption that hunter gatherers are locked into a primordial ‘struggle for existence’, anthropologist David Graeber and archaeologist David Wengrow (2021, 136-7) warn us that we must take care not to present a romanticised visions of small scale societies instead. Doing so would equally risk obscuring the wide variety of social structures and livelihoods that human groups such as different foraging societies have chosen. Graeber and Wengrow also suggest that the grand narratives shaped by social evolution theories often serve to present social inequality as natural, or as an inevitable consequence of the transition from foraging to agriculture. They counter that such theories were actually developed as a conservative response to Indigenous critiques of European ‘civilisation’ and inequality (2021, 5, 61).

Division of labour

The concept of ‘division of labour’ is salient across economics, sociology, and anthropology. It is also central to debates around egalitarianism and the origins of social inequalities. In anthropology, important discussions around the division of labour include whether there is a ‘naturalness’ to gender roles, how social cohesion is achieved and if conflict can be avoided, and whether capitalism builds on or supplants prior economic formations, such as processes of racialisation and class formation.

Recurring features of the division of labour include that different tasks are primarily done by one gender, and that women often do work that can be more easily combined with childcare. This idea initially appeared to anthropologists to be one of several cross-cultural universals (e.g. Murdock and Provost 1973; Whyte 1978). However, early analyses of gendered divisions of labour have been criticised for overgeneralising and naturalising social stereotypes (e.g. Anderson et al 2023; Estioko-Griffin and Griffin 1981; Slocum 1975). Moreover, feminist anthropologists have pointed out how important women’s domestic work has been to the economy, but how little public value it has been given historically (Ortiz 1994). The gendered division of labour should therefore be treated not so much as a technical allocation but as a form of social and political organisation, which ascribes differing power, prestige, and cultural appropriateness to tasks and products. Arguably, this is also true of the specialisation and allocation of roles according to criteria other than gender, including age, religious or social status, ethnicity, or caste (Wallman 1979, 14-5; e.g. Firth 1939; Parry 1980).

In the early twentieth century, many anthropologists tended to see ‘tribal’ or ‘peasant’ societies as relatively homogenous, and the limited division of labour as allocation of complementary roles that contributed towards social cohesion. This resonated with the emphasis by sociologist Emile Durkheim, that a division of labour was conducive to social solidarity. By contrast, especially in the 1970s and 1980s, anthropologists increasingly employed Marxian analyses that emphasised inequality and conflict between those that control the means of production and those that perform the bulk of the labour. A number of analyses have suggested that where capitalist relations of production are not dominant, there is less separation between production and reproduction and between the use-value of goods and their exchange-value, and therefore also less alienation among workers (Taussig 1977; Wallman 1979). For example, among Aymara speaking peasants studied in the Andean Highlands of Bolivia in the 1970s, festive work parties known as chuqu were important ways of organizing agricultural work. Such parties complete with delicious meals, drink and music minimized alienation. Instead, they enabled different households to help each other, and to affirm personhood and the power of community relations (Harris 2007).

However, some anthropologists have also applied Marxian analyses to the gendered division of labour in non-capitalist contexts. Several of them argued that around the world, women tend to do the bulk of productive labour, but men appropriate much of their product for their own profit (e.g. Josephides 1985; Meillassoux 1981). Others cautioned against imposing Marxian frameworks and categories on all societies to analyse gender relations as if they were class based (e.g. Sillitoe 1985). For example, anthropologist Marilyn Strathern (1988, 140) suggested that Marxian (and liberal) analyses were based on Eurocentric ‘proprietorial’ understandings of labour, assuming that labour could be owned and alienated like a commodity. Such assumptions, Strathern argued, did not apply to the Melanesian understandings of work and gender relations that she was familiar with. In Mount Hagen, the Western Highlands province of Papua New Guinea, artifacts of manufacture did not conceal human relations, as Marx had argued. Instead, they made relations visible, thereby limiting the usefulness of Marxian interpretations in contexts where capitalism is not dominant.

In the same period, feminist anthropologists revisited questions of the gendered division of labour and women’s social status under capitalism, frustrated that much prevailing theory was premised on the male, waged industrial worker (Brodkin 1998; Leacock 1986). Some studies focused on how the division of labour changed, especially with respect to gender roles, when rural societies became engaged in commodity production or labour migration (e.g. Guyer 1980; Strathern 1982). While anthropologists often highlighted the role of women’s work in the domain of reproduction, some have pointed to how this separation between production and reproduction can be compounded under capitalism, with women especially taking on unwaged domestic labour. But since the 1980s, more studies have focused on how women have been drawn into the workforce, often to perform highly gendered and feminised forms of labour, such as in garment and electronics factories (e.g. Ong 1987; Lynch 2019), tea-picking (e.g. Chatterjee 2001; Jegathesan 2019), and ‘pink-collar’ office work (Freeman 2000). Often, such studies have found that women’s work is systematically devalued in the process.

Under capitalism, production regimes are based on, exploit, and exacerbate forms of social inequalities and differences, not just of gender, but also of race, age, ethnicity, citizenship status, class, as well as differences between people living in the capitalist core compared to those in its periphery (Kasmir and Gill 2022, Mullings 1986). This has long been recognised by anthropologists, who have been interested in how low-status migrants can be treated as surplus populations or cheap, disposable labour reserves (e.g. Richards 1939, 23; Barber and Lem 2018; Meillassoux 1972). With increasing globalisation, such transformations became understood in a world historical context as a shifting ‘international division of labour’. Within it, young women in developing countries play a fundamental role (Nash and Fernandez-Kelly 1983). They are the labour force that drives the integration of global production, consumption and waste disposal processes, as they often constitute the lowest paid segment of those countries that pay the lowest wages.

More recently, anthropologists have highlighted the emergence of a global ‘division of reproductive labour’, in which care work, including childcare and nursing, and domestic labour are increasingly disproportionately carried out by racialised or migrant women (Parreñas 2012; e.g. Amrith 2010; Barber and Bryan 2012; Gutierrez Garza 2019). The delegation of feminised care and domestic work can be understood within the context of wider socioeconomic shifts. Given that more middle-class women have entered full-time employment, they require cheap labour to take on gendered household and caring work. For Nicole Constable (2009), the rise in migrant care and domestic work is part of a wider ‘commodification of intimacy’ under globalised capitalism. This draws a relationship between, the commodification of domestic work, and the burgeoning demand for other forms of typically feminised, and transnational labour including sex work and surrogacy.

Frontiers and margins of capitalism

Especially after World War II, it became increasingly difficult for anthropologists to justify studies which focused mostly on ‘tribal’ and ‘traditional’ rural societies, treating them as discrete and isolated from wider global political and economic forces. On the other hand, anthropologists’ historic interest in peripheral and marginalised peoples have improved our understanding of forms of work and labour that prevail outside of metropolitan and industrialised centres of capital. They have shown how uneven global processes of extraction, dispossession, and exploitation really are. In particular, anthropology has contributed much to understanding capitalism from the perspective of the ‘frontier’. It has attended to the displacement and dispossession of local people, often Indigenous people, ‘peasants’ or smallholders, as they get caught up in the process of capitalism’s drive for expansion and accumulation through the appropriation of resources, land, and labour.

The increasing incorporation of many ‘tribal’ and ‘peasant’ societies into commodity production and labour regimes required anthropologists to take the impacts of wider political economy into account. While Malinowski’s ethnographies obscured the impact of labour migration and commodity production in the Trobriands, his students including Audrey Richards (1939) and Isaac Schapera (1947) foregrounded such impacts in their studies of rural African societies, sharing findings with colonial administrators. Thus, Richards documented how intermittent job opportunities in mines affected Bemba family dynamics in 1930s Northern Rhodesia, now Zambia. Whenever young men took up mining jobs, their fathers-in-law tended to assume more dominant roles in the lives of their married daughters and grandchildren. At the same time, those who remained behind and did not work in the mine had to share a greater amount of agricultural work among one another (Richards 1939, 134). In the 1950s, the more critical ‘Manchester School of Social Anthropology’ shifted the focus from concerns of breakdown in tradition to new urban and class identity formation in African towns and mining sites, particularly in the Central African Copperbelt. They documented how European ways of life were soon considered prestigious and desirable by local populations (Mitchell and Epstein 1959). However, anthropologists, including Mitchell and Epstein were later critiqued for underplaying the degree to which colonialism imposed white domination and violence on Africans, not just economically, but also politically and culturally (Magubane 1971).

From the mid-twentieth century, and especially the 1970s, the expansion of capitalism into areas previously deemed tribal, subsistence, and peasant economies led to a new interest in how different modes of production intersect. The 1968 protests which included civil rights and anti-war movements, as well as anti-colonial and peasant political movements and revolutions more broadly, incited critical perspectives on colonialism and imperialism (Cooper 1984; Rio and Bertelsen 2018). French structural Marxists pioneered inquiries into how colonial labour regimes thrived when linking with kinship-based modes of production, obtaining cheap labour without incurring the costs of social reproduction (e.g. Meillassoux 1972). Other anthropologists revisited the ‘agrarian question’: i.e. what happens to farming and peasant economies with the expansion of capitalism on land and labour frontiers, including the extent to which they are proletarianised, and how they resist these transformations. This period also saw much cross-fertilisation of ideas across disciplines including with History and Subaltern Studies, especially around questions of resistance and class formation (e.g. Hobsbawm 1959; Guha [1983] 1999; Scott 1976). Some applied a world historical lens to modes of production, examining how labour regimes in capitalism’s core and periphery are historically linked (Mintz 1978; Wolf 1982). This also allowed them to theorise about the role of slavery in the development of global capitalism. Mintz (1978: 95) for example, studied slavery in the Caribbean historically to show that thinking about work purely in terms of ‘modes of production’ does not capture its everyday meanings. It also obscures the multiple forms of resistance that slaves employed, and downplays the connections between different forms of labour in any given setting.

This period saw greater interest in previously neglected questions of slavery and unfree labour more generally, including a variety of bonded, forced, and trafficked labour (see Kopytoff 1982). Recent discussions of slavery and unfree labour have highlighted continuities and consequences in the twenty-first century including racialisation and racial capitalism (Pierre 2020; Ralph and Singhal 2019), and the ongoing prevalence of plantation regimes and bonded labour (Besky 2014; Chatterjee 2001; Jegathesan 2019; Li 2017). However, some have argued that we should not see unfree labour as a state of exception. Instead we may want to note how contemporary capitalism continues to depend on varieties of dehumanised, undercompensated, and coerced labour (Calvão 2016). This includes not only modern slavery, people trafficking (Howard and Forin 2019) and child labour (Berlan 2013), but also state-mandated labour migration programmes (Li 2017, Smith 2021), and even wage labour in its ideal form (Graeber 2006).

One reflection of anthropology’s historic interest in ‘othered’ and marginalised peoples has been that a significant portion of its research has been about ‘dirty work’, that is, work considered physically or socially polluting and stigmatising. Commonly, this includes work associated with death (Parry 1980), waste (Butt 2023; Millar 2018), and sex (Day 2007; Kelly 2008; Montgomery 2001; Shah 2014). This research problematizes ideas of exploitation and agency by attending to the complexities of how such work operates in various levels of legality, social stratification, commodification, and notions of respectability.

Various forms of production and labour regimes continue to exist, especially in the Global South, where so-called ‘free’ capitalist wage labour regimes are not the norm. Waged, let alone formalised, employment may be a widespread aspiration, but it remains out of reach for most people (Ferguson and Li 2018; e.g. Kauppinen 2021). Keith Hart (1973) proposed the influential concept of the ‘informal sector’ to describe self-organised work by the urban ‘sub-proletariat’ in Ghana, as an alternative or supplement to state-bureaucratised wage labour. Thinking of labour as being either formal or informal allows us to realize how scarce regular and non-precarious forms of work really are.

Anthropology’s long history of studying people on the peripheries of capitalism emerged in part from a division of labour between anthropology and sociology, with anthropology focusing on ‘traditional’ societies, leaving questions of bureaucracy and ‘professionals’ to sociologists. Laura Nader (1972) advised anthropologists interested in how power operates to turn their gaze towards those whose work it is to accrue and wield power. This call to ‘study up’ tellingly entailed new practical and ethical issues, often putting anthropologists in a position of weakness vis-à-vis their interlocutors. Recent decades have seen a burgeoning anthropological interest in elites and white-collar workers, which will be discussed in more detail in the final section.

Industrial labour

Industrial labour is defined as work performed with technology and production processes that emerged in Europe in the eighteenth century fuelled by colonial expansion. Industrialisation is associated with social changes and geographic shifts from rural regions to urban centres. It has resulted in vast and uneven socioeconomic change, environmental consequences, and led to the rise of management as a discipline. Anthropological attention to industrialisation highlights how workers at global and local levels have shaped and been shaped by state and market forces.

Early management studies shaped how anthropologists approached industrial organisations throughout the twentieth century (Harding 1955). Elton Mayo’s Human Relations theory stands out here (Holzberg and Giovanni 1981; Burawoy 1979a). Mayo studied worker productivity at the Hawthorne plant of the Chicago-based Western Electric company in 1927. Influenced by functionalist thinking, Mayo’s approach assumed that workers had an inherent need for emotional connection. It thereby emphasised psychological approaches to worker motivation. This had been neglected by Taylorist scientific management, which used ‘time and motion’ studies to rationalise tasks assigned to individuals as if they were machines. Later anthropologists would criticise Mayo and his followers for assuming harmony in the industrial workplace (Burawoy 1979a). On the one hand, this lack of attention to conflict mirrored the interest of structural-functionalist work in the creation of social cohesion. On the other hand, it may have partially reflected the political economic conditions in American and European industrial centres. From the interwar and postwar period until the 1970s, increased productivity through scientific management techniques and mass production was matched by rising wages and better incentives and conditions for workers. This arrangement, sometimes referred to as ‘Fordism’, was a phenomenon not much discussed by anthropologists at the time, although it was analysed by Antonio Gramsci as a form of corporate hegemony (Harvey 1989, 126).

From the 1970s, more scholars focussed on the conflict of interest between the managerial class and workers: how industrial modes of production disciplined and exploited workers, and the extent to which they acquiesced or resisted. Michael Burawoy’s (1979b) ethnography among Chicago factory workers showed how labourers may consent to their exploitation, impeding collective organisation and action. Within the ever-moving spheres of capital expansion and accumulation, anthropologists have revealed a multitude of ways people accommodate and resist industrialization processes. For instance, Aihwa Ong (1987) described how managerial discipline and control was subverted and resisted by Malay factory women. The women Ong studied were caught between often-conflicting demands of factory work and traditional gendered expectations and were under surveillance at work and in their communities. They resisted in subtle and dramatic ways, including becoming possessed by spirits in ‘hysterical’ episodes whilst at work, causing disruption to the capitalist logics of the factory.

While modernisation theories assumed that the relinquishing of tradition and the emulation of a Western individualism was a necessary prerequisite for industrialisation, most anthropologists argued against this ethnocentric teleology. By and large they held that it was best to analyse the historically and culturally specific conditions that accommodate different paths to industrialism (Holzberg and Giovannini 1981, 336-9). Contemporary analyses of industrial work continue to be enriched by attention to themes and insights that gained prominence in early ethnographies of ‘tribal’ and ‘peasant’ societies, such as kinship, religion, and gift exchange (Carrier 1992; Martin et al. 2021). Ethnographic writing shows how rituals, sacrifices, and other religious and magical practices can be seen as key to the success of an industrial endeavour, helping people make sense of danger and suffering (e.g. Bear 2018, Ong 1987; Taussig 1977). For instance, June Nash (1979) provided ethnographic insights into the lives of Bolivian tin miners during the 1970s, whose exploitation and dependency underpinned Latin American industrialization. Her study showed that in spite of suffering from great physical and economic hardship, miners were not alienated from their cultural roots, and had not lost their sense of self-worth as part of their work. That is because they made sense of their work by drawing on a mix of ideologies and cultural resources, including socialism and communism as well as Andean and Christian beliefs in deities operating above and below ground.

How industrialisation changes or is folded into local identity categories varies. In his research on a bicycle factory in West Bengal, Morton Klass (1996) found that despite management assuming that workers were a homogenous class, the latter used their caste identity to organise themselves and their labour. However, based upon thirty years of fieldwork in the steel town of Bhilai, Jonathan Parry (2020) argues that even in a hierarchically complex society like post-Independence India, class analysis—in this case between securely and insecurely employed labourers—is the most analytically salient way to understand differing life paths and chances. Other anthropologists have looked at how ethnic, religious, and racial tensions are stoked and mitigated in industrial settings (Sanchez 2016; Yelvington 1995). They have also provided significant insights into how processes of non-capitalist industrialisation, as well as the subsequent transition to post-socialism, were experienced in Eastern and Central Europe (e.g. Morris 2016; Rajković 2018). China’s remarkably rapid industrialisation process since 1978 has also been explored through ethnography, with a focus on the role of labour control and flexible supply chains in the context of the distinctive Chinese state-driven modernisation programme and transnational processes (e.g. Ong and Nonini 2003; Rofel 1999; Rofel and Yanagisako 2019).

Transformations of work under late capitalism

The past forty years have witnessed immense changes in work and the labour process, marked by flexibilisation, outsourcing, increasing use of information technologies, self-branding, and the severing of obligations between employers and employees. These shifts are related but not reducible to neoliberalism. This period has been termed ‘late capitalism’, to frame changes in both work and theoretical concerns. It has been a pivotal period for the anthropology of work and labour. Much of the research produced under and about late capitalism has clear echoes of earlier themes of how work is organised, including the growth of market logics and global inequality. However, it highlights how neoliberal policies, globalisation, and financialisation processes have increased precarity on a global scale, even encroaching on traditionally secure classes of work and workers. Working in precarious times has, in turn, led many to use the frames of ethics and affect to both analyse and interrogate the push towards self-cultivation and emotional management in the workplace. It has also led authors to question (neo)liberal assumptions regarding the necessity and value of work more generally.

Neoliberal policies and financialisation processes implemented in the 1980s ended a Fordist pact between labour, industry, and government in the Global North, in which rapidly rising corporate profits went hand in hand with rising living standards for most people in high-income countries (Harvey 1989). Increased computational capacity and accelerated neoliberal policies shifted the anthropological gaze towards how outsourcing and globalisation were being implemented and experienced unevenly between and within the Global North and South. Ethnographies of the Global South investigated how workers at various points along global value chains experienced intensified exploitative relationships with multinational organisations that needed raw materials and labour to implement the technologies of globalisation (e.g. Ong 1987; Ferguson 1999; Freeman 2000). Meanwhile, anthropologists of work in the Global North were exploring the aftermath of deindustrialisation (Doukas 2003; Mollona 2005; Nash 1989) and the growth of the high-tech industry. The latter facilitated globalisation and offered new but unevenly distributed opportunities to IT workers (Amrute 2016; Folz 2008; Hakken 2000; Xiang 2007).

Following the 2008 financial crisis, many anthropologists became interested in how such transformations were experienced in terms of rising uncertainty and precarity. The shift to more insecure, short-term work has occurred in conjunction with new technologies including artificial intelligence (AI) and platform-based work. Several recent studies have highlighted how the technologies may be new but are not as ‘smart’ as they may appear and in fact are dependent upon precarious workers engaged in unstable piece-rate work (Irani 2015; Gershon 2017; Gray and Suri 2019). Studies of gig workers shed light on the contextual nature of why workers resist or welcome the flexibility associated with precarious work. For example, a recent study of Argentinian taxi drivers fighting Uber’s destabilising encroachment (del Nido 2021) contrasts with that of Thai motorcycle taxi drivers who prefer the freedom offered by precarious, dangerous work over the constraints of factory jobs (Sopranzetti 2017). Precarity is increasingly a concern among professionals, including academics. Some anthropologists have turned their gaze inward to the labour process of producing academics and the marketisation of education, demonstrating how precarity can foster exploitative knowledge production (Gershon 2018; Platzer and Allison 2018).

More anthropologists answered Nader’s (1972) call to ‘study up’ with an increased interest in white-collar professionals. Since the 2000s, ethnographies have explored the working lives of investment bankers and traders (Ho 2009; Zaloom 2006), bureaucrats (Mathur 2016), and the ‘consultants’ who fill the gaps created by late capitalist organisational structures that are no longer premised on in-house expertise (Chong 2018; Stein 2017). In much of the world, attaining white-collar and professional employment is highly aspirational, with families mobilising resources and contacts in the hope of attaining economic security, social status, and upward mobility (e.g. Kauppinen 2021).

One fertile area of inquiry in recent decades has been where questions of labour intersect with the burgeoning interest in ethics and self-cultivation, affect, and hope. Anthropologists have shown how people incorporate work into their ethical and aspirational life-projects and cultivating their sense of self (e.g. Kauppinen 2021; Zaloom 2006). This can be seen as the continuation of established scholarly interest in motivations for and meanings of work, as exemplified in the work of Malinowski and his students. But a focus on labour can also offer a critical purchase on these themes, showing how ethical, emotional, and relational capacities can be harnessed to extend and legitimate neoliberal restructuring and flexible accumulation. Scholars have noted that neoliberalism encourages the formation of ‘entrepreneurial selves’ using personal development techniques and self-discipline (Freeman 2015; Mackovicky 2016). For example, the ‘personal branding’ industry exemplifies how individualisation and self-management are mobilised in response to an increasingly impersonal labour process (Gershon 2016).

Work often demands ‘affective’ or ‘emotional’ labour, in which often gendered capacities for care, affective and emotional management become commercialised and harnessed for profit (Hochschild 1983; Zaloom 2006). Workers as diverse as Mexican NGO staff and Indonesian steelworkers turn out to be moved by affect, and are constituted as neoliberal subjects in the process (Richard and Rudnyckyj 2009). Meanwhile, governments have increasingly abdicated the provision of public services to the private and the third sector, commanding affective labour in the form of voluntary work. For example, the Italian state sought to mobilise public feelings and post-Fordist desires for social belonging toward eliciting unremunerated voluntary work in the social service sector (Muehlebach 2011). Of course, feelings of exploitation and personal investment in work are not mutually exclusive. Instead a more nuanced understanding of feelings in the neoliberal context may be required, as people who yearn for meaning and connection can sometimes even find it in the midst of exploitative circumstances (Freeman 2020).

On the other hand, some have responded to the end of the Fordist pact, increasing precarity, and jobless growth by questioning assumptions about the value and necessity of work under late capitalism. Graeber (2018) famously argues that a significant portion of jobs done in the Global North, particularly white collar jobs that have proliferated in recent decades, are essentially pointless and contribute little to society. He sees the valorisation of such work as rooted in Protestant and capitalist ethics, which value work and suffering for its own sake. Combined with a neoclassical idea that pay is compensation for the disutility of work, this has resulted in the most socially valuable forms of work, such as nurses, teachers, and cleaners, often being the least remunerated. Meanwhile, ‘proper jobs’ promised to the Global South as a telos of economic development have failed to materialise (Ferguson 2015; Li 2018). Several scholars have thus proposed universal basic income as an alternative to a politics of premising economic citizenship and social incorporation on wage labour (Ferguson 2015; Li 2018). However, other ethnographic accounts show that there is a popular tendency across a variety of sociocultural contexts to predicate ideas of ‘deservingness’ on participation in labour (e.g. Fouksman 2020; Hann 2018). This suggests that the presence of a work ethic cannot be reduced to Protestant or (neo)liberal ideologies. Indeed, in some contexts, labour is seen as fundamental to the achievement of full, independent, adult personhood (Jiménez 2003; Martin et al. 2021).

Many of these issues associated with late capitalism were exacerbated by the covid-19 pandemic, which revealed the limitations inherent to flexible supply chains and labour arrangements and upended the lives of workers and consumers globally. The pandemic further disrupted assumptions about the necessity and valorisation of work by raising the question of what kinds of work and workers are ‘essential’ (Collins 2023). The simultaneous valorisation of and disregard for socially essential workers also brings into stark relief processes of flexibilisation, precarity, and individualized risk. The precariously employed were made more precarious as they were thrust into dangerous circumstances by stay at home and return to work orders (Garimella et al. 2021; Iskander 2020; Rath and Das Gupta 2022). It is important to note, however, that for workers accustomed to near-constant crises of one kind or another, such as small-scale miners in Ghana, the pandemic has been experienced as just one of many interruptions to their livelihood (Pijpers and Luning 2021). The pandemic also exposed the fragilities and limits of the state and late capitalism's reliance on civil society and the third sector (Lachowicz and Donaghey 2022). That so many people were moved to contribute additional care and reproductive labour, often without being remunerated, further highlights neoliberal logics, which elicit and exploit individualised ethical, emotional, and relational propensities, as well as capacities for self-discipline.

Conclusion

The anthropology of work and labour reveals the concreteness of how people make a living in the context of their immediate natural and social environments. It elucidates diverse perspectives on work from within and beyond capitalism. In particular, ethnographies show how social roles and identities everywhere are made meaningful through the labour process, and how they are valued differently through time and space. This entry has charted how anthropologists increasingly wrestled with the transformations wrought by colonialism and capitalist expansion often left out of earlier theoretical frameworks. However, insights drawn from the holistic frameworks of early ethnographic studies in small-scale societies continue to enrich contemporary accounts of work. Ethnographies conducted in the heart of industrial and commercial centres can capture the integration of production and social reproduction, and the perpetuation of kin-like, ritual, and gift-like social relations and practices where one might assume either alienation or self-maximisation. Ethnographic methods also reveal the contradictions in how paid and unpaid work can simultaneously elicit experiences and feelings of exploitation, alienation, discipline, and tedium, as well as forms of emotional and relational attachments, meaning, fulfilment, and creative expression.

To some extent the anthropology of work and labour maps onto broader theoretical developments in anthropology, as it can be divided into evolutionary, functionalist, Marxian, feminist, and ethical approaches. Yet, it also reveals how these theoretical ‘turns’ themselves reflect and respond to broader political economic transformations. The anthropology of work and labour is particularly susceptible to such societal shifts, as it focuses on how people everywhere are interconnected, and how modes of livelihood are themselves the outcome of global historical processes. An anthropological understanding of work and labour therefore sharpens our understanding of emerging questions surrounding the future of work. It teaches us how we may respond to rapid technological transformations, political and economic uncertainties, conflicts and resource competition, as well as pandemics and climate change.

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White, Leslie A. 1943. “Energy and the evolution of culture.” American Anthropologist 43: 335–56. https://doi.org/10.1525/aa.1943.45.3.02a00010

Whyte, Martin K. 1978. “Cross-cultural codes dealing with the relative status of women.” Ethnology XVII, no. 2: 211–37. https://doi.org/10.2307/3773145

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Xiang, Biao. 2007. Global “body shopping”: An Indian labor system in the information technology industry. Princeton: Princeton University Press.

Yelvington, Kevin. 1995. Producing power: Ethnicity, gender, and class in a Caribbean workplace. Philadelphia: Temple University Press.

Zaloom, Caitlin. 2006. Out of the pits: Traders and technology from Chicago to London. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Note on contributors

Jasmine Folz is a Research Associate in the Human Computer Systems group at the University of Manchester. Her research deals with the political, economic, and social aspects of high-tech workers generally and the Free and Open Source Software community in particular. She has conducted fieldwork in the United States and India.

Dr. Jasmine Folz, Department of Computer Science, Kilburn Building, Oxford Road, Manchester M13 9PL, United Kingdom. jasmine.folz@manchester.ac.uk

Rachel E. Smith is a Lecturer in Anthropology at University of Aberdeen. Her doctoral research focused on the local perspectives on work, development, and social change in a rural Vanuatu community with a high degree of engagement in New Zealand’s seasonal labour mobility programme. More recently, she has looked at the production and export of kava, a crop traditionally grown and consumed across the Pacific.

Dr. Rachel Smith, Department of Anthropology, Edward Wright Building, Aberdeen AB24 3RX, United Kingdom. rachel.smith1@abdn.ac.uk

[1] The degree to which work and labour is uniquely human has been long contested. Marx defined labour as distinctly human because although a bee may construct a hive that puts a human architect to shame, only the human architect can imagine the end product and thus their work is borne of conscious purpose (1992, 284). By contrast, Lewis Henry Morgan (1868, viii) saw in a beaver’s dam communicative labours that were “suggestive of human industry”. Timothy Ingold (1983) rejects Marx’s distinction between animal instinct and human work, arguing that if humans are both objectively part of the physical world and subjective agents, so too are at least some nonhuman animals, whose labour must be acknowledged as such. Others argue that what makes humans unique is not that they work but that their ability to expend and harness more energy than other animals allows more time for leisure necessary for developing our unique sociocultural lives (Kraft et al. 2021). Certainly, many anthropologists have focussed on human-animal relationships as central to discussions of livelihood (e.g., Evans-Pritchard 1940; Fijn 2011; Blanchette 2020) and recent anthropological interest in multispecies relations has some revisiting Marx to ask, can (nonhuman) animals, and ‘nature’ more generally, be exploited? (e.g., Beldo 2017; Besky and Blanchette 2019; Hurn 2017).

[2] Historical particularism is the first American school of anthropological theory. Founded by Boas and popularised by his many students, it was developed in reaction to what Boas found to be an uncritical use of social evolutionary frameworks popular in the late 19th century. Historical particularism was premised on the belief that cultural differences and similarities had to be understood within the contexts of unique environmental, psychological, and historical conditions. It introduced the concept of cultural relativism, and the four field approach that combines cultural anthropology with archaeology, linguistics and physical anthropology and that still predominates in many American anthropology departments (McGee & Warms 2000: 131).

Editor:

Riddhi Bhandari

Dependence

Rebecca Tishler — Fri, 26 Feb 2021 18:57:54 +0000

Keir Martin

University of Manchester

Initially published 26 Feb 2021

http://doi.org/10.29164/21dependence

Abstract:

Dependence is often considered as a primarily negative state of being. It has gone from being described as a threat to individual self-reliance in early modern political theory in Western Europe to being a moral panic in political discourse across the world. Its negative connotation is particularly evident in the spheres of politics and economics, which this entry will focus on. Although anthropological theory has only recently made dependence a topic of explicit theoretical reflection, the idea has underpinned a wide variety of approaches throughout the discipline’s history. Given the tendency of anthropologists to stress the fundamental interdependence of human beings, they have emphasised that dependence is not always a bad thing and can even be desirable. They have also questioned whether or not we can neatly divide the world’s population into those in states of dependence versus independence. Lastly, they have considered the performative effects of ascribing dependence to some and independence to others. Ethnographically sifting through the different performative effects of ascriptions of dependence becomes particularly important today, as assumed states of dependence have become key tools in the management of populations across the world.

Introduction: dependence in context

The spectre of economic dependence haunts our world. In Western Europe and North America, we have long been familiar with attacks on welfare claimants on the basis that benefit payments encourage dependence. These claims are often based on racialised (see Morgen & Maskowsky 2003) or gendered (see Skeggs 2004) stereotypes, as they target particular groups as being somehow inherently prone to slipping into a negatively evaluated state. Accusations of dependence can often appear as the means by which business or political elites seek to delegitimise the claims for assistance of less fortunate members of society (see Martin 2013). This horror of dependence in Western public discourse is consistent with a long-standing similar aversion to dependence in Western political theory. Although we can trace the origins of the attempt to denigrate and police dependence in political theory to seventeenth century writers such as Thomas Hobbes and John Locke, it is at the start of the twenty-first century that moral panics over the extent and effect of people’s dependence have become a global concern (Martin & Yanagisako 2020). Fear that economic dependence may lead to a wider breakdown in community cohesion and individual moral responsibility ranges from North America (Morgen & Maskowsky 2003) through South Africa (Ferguson 2013) to Papua New Guinea (Martin 2013). What sense can we make of such a global phenomenon and what might anthropological theory add to our understanding of it? This entry will show the ways that anthropologists have foregrounded different cultural evaluations of economic dependence in their ethnographic analysis. It thereby challenges the assumption that independence is the highest aspiration for adult humans, which lies at the heart of much political theory and economic discourse globally.

The valorisation of independence and the denigration of dependence are so well established in contemporary political and economic discourse that it might seem hard to imagine a world in which this was not the case. Yet, the central importance given to the idea of economic independence can be seen as a comparatively recent phenomenon, even in Western Europe. Writing in the 1850s, Karl Marx argued that the idea of the isolated and independent individual, who was the starting point of most political and economic analysis of the time, was itself the outcome of the particular organisation of Victorian capitalist society and that,

… the more deeply we go back into history, the more does the individual… appear as dependent, as belonging to a greater whole… in the family, and in the family expanded into the clan (1973 [1857-61]: 26).

Marx argues that it is only with the rise of capitalist modernity in the eighteenth century that these dependencies appear less visible and as a consequence that the ‘standpoint… of the isolated individual’ can emerge (1973 [1857-61]: 26).

A similar set of arguments are made by the political theorist C.B. Macpherson, who argued that early proto-liberal theorists such as Hobbes, Locke and James Harrington shared an underlying assumption of the ideal innate individual independence of adult males. This position of independence was at the core of what Macpherson (1962) described as the ideology of ‘possessive individualism’ that marked the birth of a new form of personhood. The possessive individual was held to be born ‘owing nothing to society’ for his capacities and in a state of individual self-ownership (Macpherson 1962: 263-4). However, this valorised independence could be given away by those who acted in a manner that made them dependent on others. Begging and wage labour, for example, were widely seen as relationships that created dependence in seventeenth century England. Variants of this view arguably continue to dominate much political discourse today, such as in debates that focus on the alleged morally negative impacts of ‘welfare dependence’.

Anthropological theory tends to take a different starting point, for a number of reasons. Given their strong focus on how values vary across and within cultures, most anthropologists sympathise with Marx and Macpherson’s caution that dependence may not be universally valued negatively compared to independence just because this has been the case in Western political thought since the 1700s. Secondly, because of their focus on the importance of social relations in shaping our lives, anthropologists most often begin their analysis by stressing interdependence as a fundamental part of human existence. This means that rather than starting from the assumption of independence as much of modern economic and political theory does, anthropologists tend to start from exploring how people are entangled with and mutually dependent upon each other. Rather than assuming that independence is good and dependence is bad, anthropological research has tended to show that whether or not dependence is positively or negatively evaluated, or indeed what kinds of relationships are evaluated as being examples of ‘dependency’ at all, can only be understood in the context of the lived experience and world-views of the communities among which we conduct research.

Importantly, anthropological analyses of ideas, such as ‘dependence’, have long included a focus on two important aspects. On the one hand, they foreground the contextually shifting nature of what such ideas might refer to. On the other hand, they ask how such ideas shape the obligations and relations that they help to categorise. As Nancy Fraser and Linda Gordon observe in their discussion of the role of the concept of ‘dependence’ in shaping US politics, it is only by charting the ‘major historical shifts in the usage of this term’, that one might hope to understand its role as a tool of political governance (1994: 310). In the case of US political governance, Fraser and Gordon argue that by the late twentieth century, dependency had come to act as a keyword that, among other effects, was used to accuse single mothers of moral failing and took attention away from wider social structural inequalities. Rather than taking descriptions of ‘dependence’ as descriptive statements whose truth is to be validated or debunked, ethnographic analysis can explore the different contested dynamics by which a state of dependence is ascribed to or rejected by particular groups of people. This changing and performative role of ascriptions of dependence is here taken as a starting point.

Dependence in anthropological theory

Dependence has long been a central concept underpinning a variety of classical anthropological analyses, from accounts of how gift exchange creates leaders in the South Pacific by making others ‘dependent’ upon them (e.g. Malinowski 1922: 161, Sahlins 1963: 292, Epstein 1969: 223, Gregory 1982: 51), through the ascription of ‘dependence’ upon the environment or nature to peoples with ‘simple’ material cultures (e.g. Evans-Pritchard 1940: 16) to analyses of particular kinds of social systems, such as patron-client relations, with ‘dependency’ at their heart (e.g. Davis 1977: 81). Structures of dependence can sometimes act as fundamental markers for the difference between Western culture and other cultures. Based on ethnographic material collected in Melanesia, Marilyn Strathern argues that the nature of gift exchange transactions makes the parties to the exchange ‘reciprocally dependent upon one another’ (1988: 144). She thereby argues that dependency was actively sought in parts of Melanesia, inverting the modern European association between commodity exchange in the marketplace and the ideal of independence, noted by Marx. Yet despite the centrality of the idea of dependence to the framing of so much anthropological theory, the concept itself has remained largely unexplored as an explicit topic of anthropological theorising, unlike other concepts such as ‘kinship’ or ‘exchange’, both of which could easily be seen as either constituted by or constitutive of relations of dependence.

This is doubly surprising given the concept’s explicit centrality in other fields of enquiry with which anthropology has long had a critical engagement, beyond political theory mentioned above. For example, as Lynn Morgan (1987: 136) notes, many anthropologists in the 1970s and 1980s largely accepted uncritically the idea of ‘dependency theory’ imported from development studies as an explanation for global inequalities in fields such as international trade, macroeconomic growth, and health care. Dependency theory was a theory developed by Marxist and radical scholars in the second half of the twentieth century that argued that countries in the global South were kept in a state of permanent and deliberate economic dependence upon powerful Western nations that benefitted by extracting surplus value from them (e.g. Wallerstein 1974). Morgan argues that although dependency theory was useful in drawing attention to global interdependencies and the ways in which they structured enduring socioeconomic inequalities, they often assumed that the development of capitalist markets occurred in fundamentally the same manner across the world (1987: 139-46). This carried the danger of blinding their advocates to the importance of cultural or historical variations in the kinds of relations of dependence that entanglement in the capitalist ‘world system’ created. It also meant that they tended to assume that international dependence always took on a similarly negative form. Some anthropological texts, (e.g. Comarroff 1985: 154-6), did critically engage with the assumption of one-way ‘dependency’ of the global South upon the West that characterised approaches such as ‘world-system(s) theories’, a political economic theory that grew out of ‘dependency theory’ in the 1970s. Jean Comaroff argues that dependency theory presents the world capitalist system as a total, penetrating, and determining force that overlooks the interaction of this particular sociocultural order with other formations (1985: 154). But even such critiques of dependency theory did not address the term ‘dependence’ head on but largely focused on other implicit biases, such as the way in which it tended to assume a singular logic to capitalist ‘penetration’ of local societies regardless of cultural or historical differences.

Anthropologists have also provided critiques of conceptions of dependency that were at the heart of conservative academic approaches to the problems of welfare and social exclusion in Western liberal democracies over the past four decades.^[1] In opposition to these views, anthropologists have attempted to redraw debates around welfare away from a narrow focus on the alleged dependency of particular individuals or households, towards the wider question of growing economic inequality in countries such as the US from the 1990s onwards (Morgen & Maskovsky 2003: 317). Although anthropologists have provided critiques of accusatory uses of the concept of dependence, this critique has tended to be limited. They either rejected that the urban poor are best described as ‘dependent’ in particular contexts, or the showed that dependency did not usually have morally debilitating effects on people (e.g. Morgen & Maskovsky 2003: 325-6, Wacquant 2009: 46-51). Sandra Morgen and Jeff Maskovsky, for example, demonstrate the ways in which anthropologists, such as Katherine Newman (1999) have sought to challenge the conception of single mothers on welfare as being dependent due to moral degeneracy or dysfunctional lifestyles. Whilst this work provided a rebuttal of conservative conceptions of ‘dependence’ among poor urban communities, it largely avoided providing a theoretical analysis of the concept’s analytical limitations and political performative effects more generally.

Some of the groundworks for a general theory of dependence have been laid by sociologists. One of the most significant works in the history of British sociology is 1957’s Family and kinship in East London. In this book, Peter Wilmott and Michael Young argued against traditional sociological models, which held that a move from the rural to the urban in ‘advanced’ economies, such as the UK, automatically led to the death of extended kinship systems and communities built upon such networks. Inspired by anthropological fieldwork in Britain’s rapidly decolonising empire, Young and Wilmott conducted long term fieldwork in London’s East End largely based upon repeated semi-structured interviews and on-going participant observation. They discovered that this part of London was informally governed by kinship networks, several generations deep and normally headed by an elderly strong matriarch. This was reminiscent, they argued, of the kind of structure that anthropologists had found in African villages (Young and Wilmott 1957: 57-8). Their insight might seem unsurprising today, but at the time it was something of a revolution.

In Family and kinship, Young praised the community that he saw as emerging from people’s dependence on kinship ties. He feared that the welfare state was loosening those ties and thereby ushering in an age of irresponsible individualism. While dependence on the state allowed the poorest to escape dependence upon their communities that had previously restrained their potentially anti-social behaviour, welfare payments also risked creating an illegitimate and unearned independence with dangerous anti-social consequences. It was dependence on these kinship networks that Wilmott and Young saw as providing the discipline and sanctioning force that stopped young East-Enders from indulging in petty crime, violence, sloth, and so on. This concern was a muted backdrop to Family and kinship but became an increasingly urgently stated concern in Young’s returns to the East End (Gavron, Dench & Young 2005). Here East London’s white working class was portrayed as having lost the community that sustained it half a century earlier. It was now unfavourably compared to Bengali immigrants in the area, who still lived in a community due to their reluctance to rely on state benefits and their persistent dependence on kin.

Young’s pessimist reappraisal was consistent with an emerging fear among politicians and commentators in the UK in the early 2000s that full employment would never return and that sections of the working class had become content with their allegedly illegitimate and unearned independence from community that dependence on the state had bought them. This fear was shared by centrist politicians who espoused the then-prevalent politics of multicultural neoliberalism. What Young’s interventions illustrated was that underpinning these fears was the continued rhetorical importance of a link between labour and independence. In essence, Young argued that if you want independence from your kin (a morally dubious desire in his eyes in the first place) then you should earn it rather than expect it by right. Young’s intervention draws attention to the continuing importance of wage labour as an ideal, if not always a present, reality in shaping the boundaries of dependence and independence. This is a long-established linkage in Western political theory, and debate continued to matter in the early 2000s. It is a linkage that a range of anthropological analyses have sought to problematise.

Wage labour and dependence

In many parts of the world it has become common to think of wage labour as one of the main available prerequisites for full independent personhood, at least for those born without access to inherited wealth. Yet we know that this is a highly context-dependent perspective. In fact, wage labour was originally held in seventeenth century England to be a form of dependency upon an employer little different from vagrancy or begging. At the time, only property ownership was cast as the basis for the non-dependence that enabled full individual participation in politics (e.g. Macpherson 1962: 128). It was only in the early nineteenth century that wage labour had become reconceptualised as the basis for the poor to gain independence. Historical analyses such as that of Karl Polanyi (1957 [1944]) in The great transformation have drawn attention to the ways in which dependence became characterised as a moral vice by middle-class social reformers in this period. Polanyi tied this process to the increasing need for the rising power of the market in organising society and the consequent need to encourage the spread of wage labour. His analysis also draws our attention to the ways in which dependence on state authorities, wage labour, and kinship ties are mutually constitutive. Polanyi describes how reductions of relief for the rural poor in the United Kingdom (which can be viewed as the precursor of contemporary welfare programmes) were a central part of dividing a ‘respectable’ and ‘deserving’ working class, labouring to achieve independent self-reliance, from a class of ‘undeserving’ and ‘dependent’ paupers. A key moment in this transition was the abolishment of the so-called ‘Speenhamland’ system of poor relief, in which many local parishes had subsidised the living expenses of the unemployed rural poor. It was replaced with the Poor Law of 1834 that mandated parishes to force the unemployed into workhouses. Such changes in the nature of wage labour and state support are intimately entangled with changes in the nature of kinship interdependencies, as Polanyi observes. He points out that there had never been a public policy more popular than Speenhamland, as it meant that ‘parents were free of the care of their children, and children were no more dependent upon parents’ (Polanyi 1957: 83). Polanyi here foreshadows Young’s anxieties two centuries later, about the ways in which dependency on the state increased the possibility of independence from kin.

Anthropologists have also observed that the emergence of wage labour as a key social relationship in many parts of the world has reconfigured understandings of dependence and independence, challenging the universalising assumptions of liberal political theory. Australian expatriates, studied in Port Moresby between 1970 and 1972, which was the capital of the colonial territory of New Guinea at the time, considered wage labour to potentially lift ‘natives’ out of the morally debilitating state of inefficient dependencies on kin held to hold them back (Strathern 1975). For New Guinea migrants in Port Moresby, however, wage labour was sometimes characterised as a humiliating form of dependence upon employers who were not restrained by such obligations from potentially using their economic power to humiliate or damage their employees.

Ethnographic accounts from Europe also complicate the assumptions that the relationship between wage labour and dependence is clear-cut. Andrea Muehlebach’s account of the outsourcing of care of the elderly in Italy to poorly paid migrant workers from 2003 until 2005 draws our attention to the ways in which wage labour is not a singular category. Relatives of the elderly often demanded a degree of attention and emotional care from paid care workers that went beyond what might be expected in other similarly paid jobs. As one informant put it, it was not a ‘… normal job. You’re not a bricklayer’ (Muehlebach 201: 211). Muehlebach draws attention to the ways in which the perceived ‘dependency’ of the elderly recipients of care led to a situation in which the workers’ activities were viewed as sitting uneasily between an ethos of professional wage labour and affection. Her informants point to a difference between paid workers and care volunteers in this regard. The volunteers are normally Italians who provide care for the elderly out of a sense of vocation. Although they are not kin to the elderly that they assist, they are seen as providing an affective and genuine care that is more similar to the kind of support that kin should ideally be providing. The activity of the immigrant workers, on the other hand, is rendered morally dubious in the eyes of many informants by virtue of being conducted in exchange for wages.

Redrawing ‘dependence’ in the twenty-first century

Modernist teleological hopes that wage labour might expand across the world and provide the basis for universal ‘independence’ have become increasingly hard to sustain in the twenty-first century (Ferguson 2015). The increasing doubt about expanding ‘wage-dependent independence’ marks an epochal shift in how we understand legitimate citizenship and full personhood globally. However, the links between wage labour, idioms of independence, and full citizenship do not change according to singular global logic. In some contexts, such as Southern Africa for example, there can be increasing tolerance for citizenship, even for those who depend on government assistance programmes or universal-national basic income (Ferguson 2015). In others, the response might be an intensification of the rhetorical link between wage labour and legitimate independence, such as in the increasing prevalence of work training schemes in countries like the UK. Such schemes are often described as being largely designed to humiliate participants for their ‘dependence’ upon the state (e.g. Foster 2017: 119).

James Ferguson’s 2013 article ‘Declarations of dependence’ and his subsequent expansion of the article’s main thesis in his 2015 monograph Give a man a fish explicitly deal with the issue of how we might have to reconsider ascriptions of dependence in a time in which more and more people are coming to be ‘surplus’ to the needs of a wage labour economy. Both texts were also major factors in bringing discussion of ‘dependence’ as an analytical category to the forefront of anthropological theory. As noted, the ascription of ‘dependence’ had previously been critiqued by anthropologists who were opposed to the war on welfare that had characterised, in the 1980s, the Thatcher government in the UK and the Reagan government in the US, and their successors. They explicitly asked if and when ‘dependence’ was to be viewed as a barrier to legitimate adult personhood or citizenship. Building on fieldwork in Southern Africa, Ferguson drew a contrast between Western ‘liberal thought’ that presented dependence as ‘the opposite of freedom’ on the one hand, and a Southern African perspective that ‘has long recognized relations of social dependence as the very foundation of polities and persons alike’ (2013: 223). Ferguson’s work addressed head-on the underlying assumption that dependence led to un-freedom and a lesser form of individual personhood that had been identified by Macpherson as the unstated but implicit assumption underlying classical liberal political theory in the West.

Since their publication, Ferguson’s works have inspired an extensive and broadly supportive body of literature, that illustrate the importance of relations of dependence in enabling types of valued subjectivity that diverge from that of the ideal autonomous individual of Western liberal theory in Southern Africa and beyond. Most of this literature broadly shares Ferguson’s point that relations of dependence continue a long-standing Southern African cultural pattern. They are expressive of a ‘form of a political logic that was broadly characteristic of most precolonial southern African societies’ (Ferguson 2013: 226). Indeed, earlier comparative anthropological works that contrast political power in Europe and Africa describe European power struggles as being largely concerned with control of land. This stands in contrast to Southern Africa, where land was traditionally in abundant supply and leadership amounted to a contest to attract as many followers as possible, a situation famously described by Suzanne Miers and Igor Kopytoff (1977) as accumulating ‘wealth in people’ (see also Vansina 1990, Guyer 1993). Political power among Ngoni in the early 1950s illustrates this point:

The principal index of power was the number of a man’s dependants. Political struggles were essentially not struggles to control wealth but to enjoy the support of followers (Barnes 1967: 30, cited in Ferguson 2013: 226).

Elements of Ferguson’s framing of dependence have been subject to critical examination by writers otherwise sympathetic to the broad thrust of his argument. One criticism is that his recent argument may lack ethnographic evidence, even if it does raise interesting points. Kathleen Rice, for example, draws attention to the ways in which Ferguson relies primarily on historical accounts rather than contemporary ethnography as his primary means of demonstrating that personhood in contemporary South Africa is deeply relational relative to the West (2015: 60).

Whilst this might seem to be a minor difference of emphasis, Rice’s intervention draws attention to a potentially wider issue. In today’s interconnected world, it may be an overgeneralisation to draw up different geographical and cultural areas and to argue that part of the essential nature of one ‘social system’ such as ‘The West’ has an abhorrence of dependence, while others, such as ‘Southern Africa’ validate and encourage it (Ferguson 2013: 226). Ferguson’s 2013 article contains no less than thirteen instances of the phrase ‘social system’ in a manner that seemed to refer to a fixed bounded sociocultural entity, such as ‘the Ngoni social system’, for example (Ferguson 2013: 225). Such schematic and frequently static models of bounded cultures make it difficult to deal with people who live at the borders of ‘cultures’; they tend to erase important differences within those boundaries; these models often fail to deal with the historical entanglements of colonialism and postcolonial global society; and they fail to deal with histories of interconnection more generally (Gupta & Ferguson 1992: 7-8). It may be the fact that Ferguson himself had pioneered criticism of such bounded cultural models twenty years earlier, that his argument around cultural difference based on dependence has found some acceptance today (e.g. Haynes 2017).

This Southern African model of leadership through amassing followers is in some regards similar to the Melanesian pattern of ‘big man’ leadership. In parts of Melanesia, local leaders known as ‘big men’ have been described as amassing dependent followers through the creation of ‘gift-debts’ that followers cannot repay. For example, a ‘big man’ may sponsor the bridewealth payments of young men, thus binding them to him with a lifelong obligation (see Martin 2019). Similar to the Southern African examples, the focus on wealth in people in Melanesia is often considered to be the outcome of an abundance of land (e.g. Martin 2018: 91-2). That said, land claims and the creation of dependent followers can go hand in hand as well. The Tolai people of East New Britain, studied between 2002 and 2004, for example claimed customary rights to land through activity on it, which included clearing and cultivation of crops. For that claim to remain active, activity had to be maintained. This in part explained the desire for big men to amass as many dependent followers as possible. They recruited them even from outside of their immediate kinship networks, as these dependents could be used to maintain land claims. By the end of the twentieth century, this situation appeared to have drastically altered, however, as a result of a population explosion and the emergence of cash cropping for the global market. As a consequence, the political economy among Tolai people today has shifted from leaders trying to maximise their number of dependents to limiting the number of people who can make claims on them (2018: 91).

Another issue raised in current debates around dependence is whether this concept lies at the heart of a cultural misunderstanding between black South Africans who validate it and predominantly white expatriates who are introducing the idea that dependence is a failing to be overcome. We already saw versions of this question in work on New Guinea (Strathern 1975). Considering wage labour to be a mechanism by which expatriates hope to drag locals out of ‘dependence’ has also been documented in Zimbabwe by Erica Bornstein. Here, foreign NGO workers have been shown to painstakingly explain to local villagers that the purpose of development programmes and child sponsorship is to encourage villagers to stand on their own two feet and that they should ‘…not depend on others but should work for themselves’ (Bornstein 2001: 613). Bornstein also describes how NGO workers explained to villagers who sought cash payments that aid-donors wanted to ‘… feel parental delight at seeing their children walking for the first time’ (2001: 613). By focusing on child sponsorship, this work draws attention to the ways in which Western liberal thought does acknowledge childhood as a legitimate stage of dependence that should ideally be transcended on the way to adulthood. The dependence of childhood and the state of dependence are often conflated in ascriptions to people in the global South by a series of powerful actors from colonial authorities in the past to development agencies in the present day. Elizabeth Povinelli’s (2002: 22) observations about how the Australian government acted as the legal guardian for every Aboriginal child in the Northern Territory from 1911 onwards points our attention in a similar direction. Because Aboriginal adults were considered insufficiently independent, they could not be trusted with the care of their own dependents, meaning that the state took it upon itself to step in and take the responsibility. These works all in their different ways frame the situation as one in which an external group or institution of Western origin (expatriates promoting wage labour, NGOs promoting development or the nation-state) step in and attempt to impose a negative understanding of dependence upon local communities. However, my own work with Tolai people in Papua New Guinea draws attention to a different dynamic, in which rapidly emerging socioeconomic inequalities within local communities have led to a situation in which it is the more economically or politically successful local people who begin to adopt the rhetoric of possessive individualism (Martin 2007). Here, local elites denigrate dependence as a means to distance themselves from their own grassroots relatives, whom they castigate for wanting to be ‘spoonfed’ (Martin 2013) or demanding to be ‘fed like children’ (Martin 2020).

Examples such as this might lead us to a wider observation, namely the need to pay attention to the ways in which the kinds of relationships characterised as relations of dependence and the values placed upon them vary far across different groups and across the years. Maxim Bolt agrees that dependence is validated in Southern Africa as a ‘basic enduring model of sociality that has… survived social and economic transformations’ in contrast to the ‘lack of freedom’ that it signals from a liberal perspective’ (2013: 244). However, he goes on to caution that the meaning and experience of relations that might be characterised as ‘dependence’ varies massively depending upon context and power relations within the particular geographic area under examination. Bolt observes, for example, that during the colonial era in Southern Africa ‘personal dependence shaped life far more explicitly on farms than on the mines’, yet mine labour was more highly validated and sought after by black South Africans for a variety of socioeconomic reasons (2013: 244). This leads Bolt to conclude that we require a ‘messier picture’ when we think about dependence (2013: 245). All of this might suggest a starting point for analysis in which anthropologists consider these manifold differences without taking them as being necessarily the outcome of different regional cultural logics. Instead, they may want to focus as much on the changing economic factors that shape how dependence is lived and experienced. In both South Africa and the UK there are on-going political struggles over the extent to which different forms of ‘dependence’ should be accepted in a changing world. In particular, the situation at the start of the twenty-first century in which the previously widely accepted link between productive wage labour and legitimate independence is being reconfigured, often in widely divergent directions (Ferguson 2015). In such times, a comparative ethnographic analysis of the social effects of contested ascriptions of dependence (Bolt 2013: 245) becomes ever more important. Such an approach would not consider ‘dependence’ as the description of a particular state of being to which a particular definition can be fixed. Instead, the task of ethnographers would become to analyse how relations that get characterised under its umbrella become grouped together, and what the wider effects of such ascriptions of dependence are.

Conclusion

The idea of ‘dependence’ has long been a central theme in many anthropological analyses as an underlying analytical assumption. It has been commonly used in the analysis of non-Western societies as a means of stressing an interdependent model of human being that stands in contrast to the assumed autonomous individual actor of Western liberal theory. When anthropologists have discussed ‘dependence’ in Western contexts, it has often been in terms of a critique of accusations of the morally debilitating effects of dependence on particular populations, such as welfare recipients. Despite this, the concept of dependence itself has only recently become a central focus of anthropological theory. In particular, the work of Ferguson has made explicit the contrast between Western liberal associations between dependence and a desired state of autonomous freedom and alternative conceptions of personhood that validate some dependencies as their basis of being. As ever-larger populations across the world are potentially being cast as surplus to the needs of the wage labour economy, a previous cultural association between wage labour and validated forms of independence is becoming increasingly contested and difficult to sustain. Anthropology has a valuable role to play in documenting and analysing the performative effects of such contested and shifting ascriptions of dependence at this pivotal moment in global history.

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Note on contributor

Keir Martin is Professor of Social Anthropology at the University of Oslo and was previously Lecturer in Social Anthropology at the University of Manchester. His work has focussed on contests over the limits of reciprocal obligation and their role in shaping the boundaries of businesses and other social entities. He conducted his main fieldwork in East New Britain Province, Papua New Guinea. This work culminated in the publication of his 2013 monograph, The death of the big men and the rise of the big shots: custom and conflict in East New Britain. He is currently leading a research project on the spread of psychotherapy among the growing middle-classes of Asia. He has published on the contemporary global political economy in a wide variety of academic and media outlets, including The Financial Times and The Guardian.

[1] Notable examples of these conservative attacks on welfare ‘dependence’ include Murray (1984), Besharov (1995), and Mead (2004).

Cooperatives

Rebecca Tishler — Thu, 20 Aug 2020 19:23:57 +0000

Theodoros Rakopoulos

University of Oslo

Initially published 20 Aug 2020

http://doi.org/10.29164/20coops

Abstract:

Cooperatives are a main means of organization for economic activity, generally operating on principles of equal membership and members’ democratic control of their means of livelihood. Co-ops have developed as modern institutions aiming to tackle problems created by contemporary capitalism and its associated dependency on wage work. Co-ops operate and interact in context, mobilising ways of human contact that anthropologists usually study (kinship, community, ethnicity, and local belief systems). Anthropologists have expressed interest in co-ops since the origins of their discipline. They tend to investigate the ways that members interact within co-op organizations, as well as the ways co-ops interact with and within broader social frameworks. Key issues arising in understanding cooperatives are how co-ops negotiate industrial democracy, how they respond to market influences, and how they interrelate with broader civil society and social movements. Anthropological critiques of cooperatives distinguish between cooperative ideology and praxis, and highlight cases where institutional cooperation does not work in favour of local communities. However, anthropologists have equally celebrated cooperatives as institutional forms that shield communities off from exploitation and promote social solidarity.

Introduction

While cooperatives (co-ops) often stand in the shadow of private companies and state institutions, they do in fact constitute a major organizational form around the globe. According to the International Cooperative Alliance (ICA), a staggering ‘12% of humanity’ are cooperative members, and thus have an immediate livelihood relation to different forms of economic cooperation.^[1] The ICA defines cooperatives as ‘an autonomous association of persons united voluntarily to meet their common economic, social, and cultural needs and aspirations through a jointly-owned and democratically-controlled enterprise’.

Although there is mindboggling variation as to what principles co-ops around the world actually follow and to what extent they do so, there are some main ideas permeating the cooperative movement globally. More specifically, cooperatives tend to adhere to a set of organizational beliefs and practices, often identified as ‘the Rochdale principles’. They were set out by the Rochdale Society of Equitable Pioneers, founded in 1844 in Rochdale, England, where the first recognised cooperative operated (in that case a consumer cooperative). These principles can be summarised as follows: in terms of members, a co-op has to have voluntary and open membership, as well as democratic member control and members’ economic participation; in terms of operation, a co-op has to have autonomy and independence, while pursuing the education, training, and information of its members; lastly, in terms of its broader social ties, a co-op has to express concern for the community as well as cooperation with other cooperatives. The Rochdale principles are normative, if open to some interpretation. What is important to note are that their key ideas pretty accurately summarise the main issues that cooperatives face, as well as summon the key terms that social analysis has associated with cooperatives: democracy, autonomy, community, common needs, participation, and joint ownership.

Cooperativism can include a variety of free forms of association and common ownership of some means of production, distribution, or consumption. A good first way to classify cooperatives is thus to divide them into three sorts: cooperatives of production, worker cooperatives, and cooperatives of consumption and distribution. Co-ops are often producer-based, where autonomous holders – for example, farmers – share one asset, such as a winery. Such cooperative forms may focus on just one aspect of agrarian production (in this example, vinification) and they may not engage farmers in the whole year in a cooperative setting but only during the harvest and distribution period (Ulin 1996). Co-ops are sometimes worker-based, where workers co-own an asset such as land, or where they work on an asset owned by the state (Rakopoulos 2018). In industry, a workers’ co-op would own the whole array of the means of production, most often a factory (Azzellini 2015). Finally, co-ops can operate as consumption and distribution institutions: there, the members commonly own an asset, for instance a supermarket, and collaborate with producers that provide them with products. These consumer co-ops are particularly common in large cities of Europe and elsewhere, as well as in local food movements (Durrenberger 2018). They very often promote products of producer co-ops. This creates an ‘ecology of cooperation’: cooperation among co-ops, and thus implicit promotion of the principles of cooperation in wider society.

Co-ops can operate in agrarian or industrial contexts, as well as in the countryside or in the city; they can be gender-based, for instance by creating women’s co-ops (Stephen 2005), or focus on class or ethnicity. The variety of cooperative forms is therefore wide but what they tend to have in common is that they work on the premise of, as a minimum, two pillars regarding control. The first pillar is democratic control: co-ops employ a one person-one vote system in their member assemblies. These meetings organise their inner workings, and are foundational for any kind of cooperativism. The second pillar is collective control: co-ops work on the grounds of sharing an asset collectively across members – be it a factory, a shop, a plot, or even a set of practical ideas.

A history of anthropological and sociological interest

Anthropological interest in cooperatives has been evident since the early twentieth century, when Marcel Mauss wrote about them. Mauss, an anthropologist most known for his analyses of gift-giving, was actively involved in cooperativism. His participation in cooperative socialism is well-documented and remains relevant to this day (Hart 2014: 35; Graeber 2014: 67). In order to fully comprehend the political project of Mauss, we need to read his most famous work, The gift in tandem with his political writings (Hart 2007: 5, Hart & James 2014). In those, we encounter a person of action, who takes an active interest in cooperation (specifically, a cooperative bread-making factory), as he sees a horizon of social emancipation and egalitarianism in the phenomenon of co-op development in France.

Mauss insisted that cooperatives brought about ‘practical socialism’ (Fournier 2006: 125). This engaged relationship with a social organization that strives for workers’ rights and a fair distribution of resources is at the heart of his view of economic anthropology. After all, the anthropology of the economy explores the idea that different but possible ways of organising economic activity can not only be imagined in theory but can be brought to fruit in historical reality. This drive brought Mauss to engage with cooperatives in France and address the English Cooperative Association across the Channel. Speaking before the First National and International Congress of Socialist Cooperatives (in July of 1900), the young anthropologist-cum-activist stated,

We will educate him [the citizen] for his revolutionary task by giving him a sort of foretaste of all the advantages that the future society will be able to offer him. ... We will create a veritable arsenal of socialist capital in the midst of bourgeois capital. (Mauss cited in Graeber 2001: 151)

Mauss’s appreciation for the cooperative movement, which marks anthropology’s first engagement with the phenomenon, is not too different from the erstwhile take of Karl Marx on the issue. Like conventional wage labour, cooperativism commenced in Marx’s area of ‘ethnographic’ expertise – Northern Britain in the mid-nineteenth century (as noted, the first co-ops had come to life in Rochdale in the 1840s). Co-ops aimed to do away with distinctions between capital and labour, while Marx, then a young revolutionary yet to engage with Britain, was studying alienation from work (1844). Marx saw in cooperatives the dialectics of capitalism’s present contradictions and the seed of future social developments, a sort of future that is present already in current circumstances.

Marx, anticipating this future-in-present, criticised but did not denounce the cooperative movement. He saw, in the movement’s attempt to bridge capital and labour, firstly a preliminary victory of the latter over the former and, secondly, ‘the husks of the old system and the seeds of the new’ (Bottomore 1991: 111). However, for that victory to be complete, political power, and not localism, was required. Marx’s interest in cooperativism was underpinned by a belief in a dialectical relationship among state, society, and market. However important the particular local cooperative struggles, they needed to articulate upon a wider reality of mostly antagonistic politics. Therefore, an attention to scale is important for understanding cooperation. For Marx, cooperatives were founded upon a historical contradiction:

The cooperative factories run by workers themselves are, within the old form, the first examples of the emergence of a new form, even though they naturally reproduce in all cases, all the defects of the existing system, and must reproduce them. But the opposition between capital and labour is abolished here, even if at first only in the form that the workers in association become their own capitalist, i.e. they use the means of production to valorise their own labour. These factories show how, at a certain stage of development of the material forces of production, and of the social forms of production corresponding to them, a new form of production develops and is formed naturally out of the old. (Marx cited in Bottomore 1991: 571)

That historical reality that engaged Marx and Mauss astounded the socialist and member of the Fabian Society Beatrice Potter Webb, who toured Lancashire in the late-nineteenth century and realised that co-ops were part of local culture (2016 [1920]). By then, Webb had already written a classic book on what was the reality of the vivid cooperative movement in Britain (2013 [1896]). She was a proponent of cooperative federalism as a political and economic system. It was to be a system of ‘cooperative wholesale societies’, in which all the members of federated cooperatives are cooperatives themselves. It might sound complicated but, especially among consumer cooperatives, it is very much a reality in many places: in Britain, for example, the Co-operative group (founded in Rochdale in 1844) is a cooperative wholesale society composed of hundreds of retail co-ops in over 3.700 locations. They employ more than 60.000 people, and amount to over 4.5 million members overall.

While Mauss’ life and work illustrate that economic emancipative experiments are not imagined or planned but experienced in the present, and Webb was interested in describing what we could call an actually existing cooperativism, Marx took a critical distance from this focus on the present. He favoured a more historical approach. Meanwhile, the sociologist Emile Durkheim, while investigating the division of labour in society (1891), established his own understanding of the idea of solidarity, a key principle in cooperativism. According to Durkheim, social solidarity is stretched across the distribution of labour in modern institutions and is part of the collective consciousness of members of society. This notion of solidarity is far more encompassing and general than common-sense versions of it. It can be seen to present a macro version of the social principle on which cooperatives operate. Durkheim has been described as ‘a kind of guild socialist’ (Morris 2005), that is, someone who does not favour class conflict but general cooperation according to trade skill. He is also known to have sympathised with cooperatives, seeing them as associations of social solidarity.

Key issues

Cooperatives have posed a variety of interesting questions since social theory first began engaging with them. They seem to supercede the antithesis between bosses and workers, something associated either with dreams about an egalitarian future (as in Marx) or with an original affluent society of people that work together in small groups of hunter-gatherers. Cooperatives have also been identified by many, including anthropologists, as a form of ‘industrial democracy’ (Holmström 1989), an idea that points to the desire of making an economy democratic, egalitarian, and participatory. They equally seem to work best within a wider ‘ecology’ of cooperative associations and federations (Ingram & Simmons 1995). There is a holistic aspect to the efficiency and influnce of cooperation: the more co-op units exist, and the more cooperation there is among them, the better this is held to be for social equality and democratic participation. A web of cooperation may allow, for example, to control as much of our own time and everyday experience as possible: working in cooperation with others in conditions we collectively choose, or shopping and consuming produce we collectively choose with other cooperators. This goal, of gaining greater democratic and egalitarian choice over the means of our social existence, suggests both an attention to local economic and social facts and an attention to how these scale up towards larger markets and networks of political power.

One way to understand how anthropology has dealt with cooperatives and their wide spread around the world is to consider three key issues: movement, scale, and egalitarianism. Anthropologists tend to discuss them with reference to the real, empirical realities studied through ethnographic work. Major findings arising from their studies include: that scaling up has been challenging for co-ops around the world; that there is indeed a tendency for co-ops to fuse within broader social movements; and that internal democracy in cooperatives is heatedly debated and contested.

Ethnographic attention to cooperatives has mainly focused on two regions, where many cooperatives operate today: Europe and Latin America. Latin American studies began already in the mid-1970s (Nash 1976) and stretch from Mexico (Ferry 2004) to Argentina (Bryer 2012). In Europe, as noted earlier, cooperatives were seen in the context of a variety of local claims, often in tandem and in dialogue with debates on ethnicity, political ideology, and worker mobilization. Contributions came principally from Spain (Kasmir 1996, Greenwood & Gonzalez 1992), as well as Italy (Holmström 1989, Sanchez-Hall 2019), France (Ulin 1996), and Greece (Rakopoulos 2014).

Democracy and egalitarianism

Co-op politics tend to be born of practitioners acting together in a collective fashion. They are less based on blueprints of overarching ideologies but instead they inform such ideologies through practice (Whyte 1999). The widely-discussed cooperativist experiment in Mondragón, the largest cooperative in the world, attracted much scholarly attention. Mondragón is based in the Basque country, and is active in a number of industries, including manufacturing, retail, and services, while emplyoing c.80.000 people today. Since its inception in the 1950s, the cooperative avoided being encompassed by totalising ideological systems: it was ‘a reaction against -isms’, like ‘socialism’ which was perceived as an ideology rather than a practice, but also Taylorist specialization and division of labour. Workers referred to the verse of poet Antonio Machado, ‘the path is made walking’ (‘se hace el camino al andar’), to explain their processual pragmatism (Whyte & Whyte 1991: 257). In that way, ‘cooperativism was true socialism—not just one way to achieve it’ (Whyte & Whyte 1991: 253). The difference to much political socialism lay in its model of practice: cooperation was defined as being about doing and experiencing a social reality, rather than applying or running after an idea.

Indeed, one of anthropology’s main contributions to cooperative debates has been to distinguish between cooperative ideology and praxis. Ethnography is an empirical and realist approach to knowledge, one that does not primarily apply theory to reality, but that aims to be inspired by reality. This has proven ideal to witness the practical and hands-on economic democracy that cooperativism suggests. In many ways, ethnographies have provided ‘test cases’, fact-checking whether co-ops actually live up to ideals of social equality and worker democracy. While some research embraces current cooperativism as ‘horizontalist’ (Sitrin 2012), that is, being radically egalitarian as opposed to working on labour hierarchies, many other contributions are critical. Some have presented a ‘disenchanted’ vision of cooperative practice – including two important books that came out in the same year: Sharryn Kasmir’s classic study The myth of Mondragón (1996), but also Robert Ulin’s book Vintages and traditions: an ethnohistory of French wine cooperatives (1996). Kasmir’s study, focusing on a workers’ cooperative, presents the Basque experiment in Spain as a ‘myth’. The co-op’s leadership trumped labour rights but considered union representation to lie at odds with cooperative membership. This stalled the potential for social egalitarianism. Ulin, focusing on producers’ cooperatives in the Southwest of France, notes that there has been an anti-elitist tendency in winemakers’ cooperation. However, their internal division of labour is nothing short of capitalist, marginalising smaller wine growers. These insights from France and the Basque country have significantly nuanced our understanding of co-ops as institutions, shining light on the ways in which their immediate livelihoods are not necessarily egalitarian and might indeed reproduce capitalist exploitation. Anthropologists have accounted for the different cleavages caused across different lines of order and normativity in members’ lives (for instance, the schism between those who share common interests with management and those who do not [Kasmir 1996: 198]).

What is more, research has shown that co-ops can include practices that are outright socially and physically destructive. In Sicily, a co-op form has been created, as a group of Mafiosi decided to form their own wine-making cooperative and in so doing conjured autonomous producers around them (Rakopoulos 2017b). Reaping social consensus through co-op participation proved very beneficial for the local Cosa Nostra, until the co-op disbanded when its leaders were arrested. Catalonian examples also include a murky undercurrent to the local cooperative history, as the Franco regime saw in the cooperative the desirable work equivalent of the ‘home’ – a corporatist, close institution (Narotzky 1988). In Catalonia, fascism found in the ideology of the casa and the cooperativa two pillars of social cohesion that complemented a Francoist vision of society as an organic field, with no social upheaval or internal contradiction. In this picture, cooperatives worked well as institutions of further worker exploitation (1997). In these examples, co-ops do bring about labour democracy and egalitarianism because they never sought to do so: they were founded by hierarchical, violent institutions (the fascist state and the Mafia), to seeking to create sense of worker cohesion and a lack of class conflict.

Other critical analyses were initially not concerned with cooperatives, but focused on kinship (Ferry 2003), ethnicity, and struggles around identity instead (Kasmir 2002). These issues might, in the first instance, seem to draw attention away from cooperative forms. Yet, kinship and ethnicity can in fact be inherent aspects of how cooperatives function and how they are experienced. Cooperatives may pool from the immediate kin group to recruit members, and people may see the house as a cooperative. Both examples show that close interconnections between family and co-op life exist (Rakopoulos 2017a). The study of cooperatives may thus point out that efforts for greater democracy and egalitarianism can be based on communitarian and family-based underpinnings.

Other encouraging studies exist: in a recent book on the fascinating history of forty years of ethnographic engagement in a ‘Red’ area of Romagna, Italy, cooperatives have been celebrated as a great achievement for social equality and progress (Sánchez Hall 2019). As the author notes, ‘I came to feel like the first anthropologist in the history of the discipline whose informants thought she came from a backward culture to study their most advanced ways’ (2019: 2). Similarly, Mark Holmström presents a story of utter fascination with Italy’s industrial democracy (1989). He sympathised with cooperatives and went on to investigate them further in the Spanish context (Holmström 1993). Investigative journalist Robert Oakeshott even went so far as to marry his life commitment to cooperativism with making the ‘scholarly case’ for co-ops (1977).

Scale and markets

Engaging with world markets reshapes not just cooperatives themselves but also the localities in which they are situated. Markets may affect the very cosmology that surround resources and people. Mexican cooperative miners, for example, have been shown to attach a varied array of signification to the precious metals that they unearth, depending on where these metals are in the ground, in their homes, or in a global exchange circuit. Thinking about how co-op members in Mexico conceptualize the silver deposits they mine, as well as the ways that this mineral enters international markets, shows that idioms surrounding family and patrimony may help make sense of the deposits they work on (Ferry 2003). Their language that presents the silver they mine as inalienable, however, coexists with its commodification. When the silver enters commercial circulation, its exchangeability eventually triumphs over its inalienability, and relations of exchange trump relations of production (Ferry 2002: 342-3). These mutually exclusive idioms and tensions between lived community (with its environmental sensitivity) and abstracted market brings us to the core of current and, potentially, future anthropological concerns with cooperative worklives and industrial democracy.

Thinking about co-ops as part of wider markets highlights questions of scale and how cooperatives as local, community institutions relate to broader systems in which they and their members operate. This tension between local thinking about cooperative environments and the global changes influencing labour, work, and co-op products animates other Mexico-focused studies (Stephen 2005). In the context of the North American Free Trade Agreement that Mexico had signed, co-ops offered a shelter from global capitalism in its neoliberal form. Similarly, work drawing on Mexico (Chiapas), as well as Italy (Sardinia) shows how cooperatives can be both in dialogue with large-scale corporate forms and an expression of a more community-based economy (Vargas-Cetina 2011). They can provide their members with some engagement with the market, whilst attempting to improve people’s living conditions by protecting them from the market’s unbridled forces, standing in opposition to exploitative market pricing and protecting labor rights (Vargas-Cetina 2009: 128). Thereby they have historically provided buffer zones of sociality to abjure capitalism’s aggressive individualisation (Vargas-Cetina 2005; cf Curl 2009), and indeed shaping notions of collective selfhood (Stephen 2005: 254; cf Nash et al. 1976). The idea is that practices of cooperation are conducive to sentiments of belonging to forms of a ‘collective’ rather than an individual self.

While co-ops thereby often stand in opposition to market logics, this is not always the case. European food cooperatives, for example, both need markets and scale back from them, focusing on self-sufficiency during times of austerity (Homs & Narotzky 2019). While coops are most often aiming to reinvest locally only (indeed, they are at times legally obliged to do so), they can also be active proponents of global capitalism, investing in companies that are located offshore (Kasmir 2016).

In actual fact, then, there is a variety of praxes and different logics informing cooperatives: from self-sufficiency and an anti-capitalist, even anti-market tendency, to one that redirects co-op priorities from egalitarianism to a corporate logic. Having a clear understanding of this multifaceted nature of cooperatives is particularly pressing, as capitalist commodification often hinges on community economics, at times turning cooperatives into so-called ‘coopitalist’ institutions (Errasti et al. 2016).

The relation between cooperatives and the expansion of capitalist production is thus tenuous and open to modifications. On the one hand, cooperatives have become a key strategy of grassroots movements to improve the livelihoods of local populations. On the other, they are part and parcel of public policies in favour of growth-based development, rising productivity, and higher employment rates. The adaptability of cooperatives has become particularly obvious in Latin America during the decade of the 2000s, as cooperatives like unions had a great deal of interactions with politically progressive governments of the ‘Pink Tide’, an array of left-leaning yet often growth-based governments.

Movements and civil society

As the introduction has made clear, cooperatives are political institutions as much as they are economic ones. Frequently, they are therefore close to social movements, endorsing for example ‘postcapitalist and anticapitalist politics’ (Miller 2015). Co-ops may unite and fuse with other social movements or even antagonise them, as has been the case with the trade union movement (Kasmir 1991, 2000). Their explicitly political nature requires attention to the values co-op members and contractual workers endorse, not just at work but also in their lives and livelihoods. Co-op members’ attempts to better their livelihoods have been rooted in specific concepts, of which ‘community’ has been one of the most important. This is not least due to the fact that co-ops are tightly linked to the notion of ‘community economies’ (Gibson-Graham 2006: 110-27), expressing broader concerns and representing wider local interests, rather than those of their stakeholders as in the case of conventional corporations. Yet, relying on the notion of community can also be problematic, when it describes actual praxis that is is in fact detrimental to egalitarian principles (as in the Sicilian mafia, see Rakopoulos 2017b: 167-172).

The practicality of cooperatives is important, as co-ops are active parts of what has been recently called the solidarity economy (see, e.g., Laville 2010). Promoting social solidarity, they are potential channels of social change in times of crisis (Gibson-Graham 2013). Their capacity for ‘prefigurative’ politics, that is, to show how economic life beyond corporate capitalism and labour exploitation is indeed possible, brings them in coalition with social movements (Maeckelberg 2012). It is the social relations that are produced within and around cooperatives that inspire both a need to liaise with other movements and a need to survive by forming coalitions (Rakopoulos 2014). Cooperatives as community paradigms (Nash 1976), coalesce with similar grassroots collective organizations to become part of the broader milieu of movements galvanised in areas such as the Mexican Chiapas. Here the co-ops’ issues start taking the shape of wider civil society issues.

This broader influence of the cooperative movement speaks to the issue of whether, and to what extent, co-ops are resilient institutions. Anthropologists have been useful in pointing out that we need to see co-ops not only as institutional associations with innate durability, but actually as ephemeral associations in a state of flux and volatility (Vargas-Cetina 2005). For example, cooperatives tend to be associated with crises. They frequently come into being to salvage jobs that would otherwise be lost in economic downturns. This was the case in Argentinian recuperated factories, post-2001. The fluctuating nature of cooperatives may be one of the reasons why this institutional form has persisted over time.

The blend of co-ops into networks of similar grassroots organizations of care, provision, self-help, and mutuality has been called a ‘social economy’ (Bryer 2012). Co-ops in Argentina, for instance, have established this social economy by taking over factories and other corporations that had gone bust (see Lewis 2004), inspiring people in Italy to follow suit (Orlando 2019). The ‘social responsibility’ that cooperatives take on board is at once a source of inspiration and a struggle for their members (Bryer 2010), who wish to show that they are part of ‘something bigger’. The movements that inspire them can be historical utopias whose present residues have taken new paths – like Zionism in contemporary urban Israel (Russel 1995). They can even be residues of a utopian past, like collectives that still operate in the face of the Soviet Union’s collapse (Humphrey 1998). At any rate, cooperatives have necessarily always operated in a broader climate, an ‘ecology’ of mutual and necessarily political associations (Lomi 1995).

Conclusion

By mobilising participation and community engagement cooperatives teach us two interesting lessons. Firstly, they play a salvaging role for labour, land and its produce, in the name of local communities and in the name of democratic ideals. These protective features of co-ops are twofold: against external forces, such as the market or the state, coops are meant to salvage local life, while internally, they aim to protect their members and their means of production. They provide shelters from globalising, un-redeeming powers of greater scale (as, e.g., per Stephen 2005; Vargas-Cetina 2005) and save jobs in transition and crises (Sitrin 2012). Thereby, co-ops often play the role of enclaves from which people can defend themselves against dispossessions of all sorts. Security of people, safety for work, protection of labour rights and the environment, as well as a relative decommodification of some cooperatively-held assets are the main aspects of this protective function.

Secondly, co-ops elucidate important debates about political economy and social life at large. They enable people threatened by unemployment to procure labour, grounded in an ethos of self-help and often building on existing social relations. They thereby have evolved from a set of ideas that recognised the conflict of capital and labour, aiming to bridge what may be unbridgeable (Restakis 2010). It is for these reasons that the anthropological literature, by and large, is committed to questioning whether cooperatives actually promote egalitarian values, and why anthropologists are often sympathetic to co-ops. This entry has focused primarily on topics to do with democracy, scale and social movements. By way of concluding, it pays to reflect on how social science has possibly helped the actual development of cooperatives.

In criticising the distinction between civil society and the state, anthropologists have asked how cooperatives became a technology of government for working people and poor populations. This critique has helped some cooperative organizers reflect on how they should not lose sight of the egalitarian principles of Rochdale when developing their co-ops. What is more, the importance of ethnicity, kinship, gender and identity in shaping cooperative practice cannot be underestimated. People participate in co-ops as gendered persons and often through their kinship networks, and co-op practice cannot take place without accounting for these realities. This empirical insight has helped contemporary cooperative movements to embrace local kinship idioms, belief systems, and community forms. Highlighting local practices in similar movements has been part of engaged anthropological thinking (Durrenberger 2018). Thus anthropologists have been avid developers of participatory action research, which allows for exchanging knowledge and expertise between researcher and interlocutor, often both members of the same cooperative organization (Gibson-Graham 2006).

Cooperative platforms also exist in anthropological thinking and practice: the online forum known as ‘Open Anthropology Cooperative’ worked for a few years to bring together thinkers and practitioners of the discipline from around the world in a digital platform. Cooperative open access publishing has also been widely thought about and informally practiced, creating online scholarly communities that render their work available to the wider public. Locked behind paywalls, anthropological publishing is, like that of all academic publishing, under the control of corporate entities. Yet, cooperative open access publishing has been democratising knowledge to a good extent, even if often through informal means. It is this spirit of cooperation that characterises anthropology, a discipline that works not with ‘subjects’ or ‘samples’ but with ‘interlocutors’ and ‘research participants’. In many ways, anthropology is cooperative by definition.

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−−−−− 2017a. Antimafia families: cooperative work and flexible kinship in Sicily. Critique of Anthropology 36(2), 115-31.

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Note on contributor

Theodoros Rakopoulos is associate professor in the Social Anthropology department of the University of Oslo. His research has focused on cooperatives: antimafia co-ops in Sicily and co-ops in the Greek solidarity economy. He has also published on silence, conspiracy theory, austerity, and mafia. He is author of From clans to co-ops: confiscated mafia land in Sicily (Berghahn 2017) and editor of The global life of austerity (Berghahn 2018), while his new book project is on the commodification of citizenship (“golden passports”) in Cyprus.

Theodoros Rakopoulos, Department of Social Anthropology, University of Oslo. theodoros.rakopoulos@sai.uio.no

[1] International Cooperative Alliance (available on-line: https://www.ica.coop/en). Accessed 10 August 2020.

Childhood

Felix Stein — Thu, 04 Jun 2020 09:17:23 +0000

Catherine Allerton

London School of Economics and Political Science

Initially published 4 Jun 2020

http://doi.org/10.29164/20child

Abstract:

Children, as the youngest members of our species, exist in all human societies across space and time. But societies differ widely in their understandings of childhood as a distinctive stage of the human life cycle. This entry describes anthropological work on childhood as a varying cultural construction, from early comparative studies of childcare and development, through work on the socialization of young children, to more recent ‘child-focused’ research that takes children’s perspectives on their role and position seriously. Anthropological research casts a critical light on institutional attempts to formulate universal understandings of childhood, whether these are found in developmental psychology, the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child, or the spread of formal schooling as an essential aspect of modern childhoods. Children, through their participation and observation in social worlds, are always understanding more than they are told by adults, often applying cultural concepts or different languages in innovative ways. This frequently leads children to destabilise or reject wider representations of childhood that reflect adult prejudices, or wider fears about the ‘disappearance’ of childhood or a loss of ‘innocence’. Paradoxically, adult attempts to protect children, whether from work or from societal harms, often say more about the politics of representations of childhood, than they do about children’s actual experiences.

Introduction: children and ‘childhood’

Children, as the youngest members of our species, exist in all human societies across space and time, and descriptions of children’s activities, talk, games, and work appear in many different anthropological texts.^[1] But human societies differ widely in their answers to the questions: ‘who counts as a child?’, ‘what kinds of care and instruction do children need?’ and ‘what knowledge do children have of their worlds?’ The study of these and other questions is part of the cross-cultural comparison of ‘childhood’ as a socio-historical construction that varies widely both across and within different societies.

Anthropological research has demonstrated that there is no single, universal understanding of childhood as a stage of the human life cycle (Montgomery 2009; Lancy 2015). As a result, anthropologists have often cast a critical light on scientific and institutional attempts to make universal pronouncements about children, or to prioritise particular understandings of a ‘normal’ childhood. This includes adopting a critical perspective on developmental psychology as ‘the’ science of childhood.^[2] Most psychological experiments have been conducted with children in what David Lancy (2018) calls ‘WEIRD’ (western, educated, industrialised, rich and democratic) societies. And yet, from the perspective of non-WEIRD societies, such understandings of ‘normal’ childhood are distinctly anomalous. For example, the American psychologist and educator, Stanley G. Hall (1904) defined adolescence as a turbulent and transitional period of ‘storm and stress’, arguing that the physical changes experienced at puberty had a tumultuous impact on young people’s emotional life. By contrast, in Coming of age in Samoa, Margaret Mead disputed this universal picture of adolescent disturbance, asking whether such difficulties were ‘due to being adolescent or to being adolescent in America?’ (1928: 5). Mead’s book painted a picture of Samoan adolescent girls whose lives were full of leisure, and who did not experience conflicts around their sexuality. Her conclusion was that the ‘storm and stress’ of American adolescence had cultural rather than biological causes, telling us more about the anxieties of American society than about children’s universal experiences. Indeed, later anthropologists have argued that the study of children is crucial to understanding key cultural values and conflicts (Hardman 2001 [1973]; Gilliam & Gulløv 2019).

A key, early influence on anthropological approaches to childhood was Philippe Ariès’s Centuries of childhood (1962), in which he argued that European children in the Middle Ages were seen and treated as little adults, lacking separate clothing, games, or spaces. Ariès thought that the very notion of ‘childhood’ as a distinct phase of life did not exist for most of European history. Although Aries’s arguments, in particular his analysis of representations of children in pictorial art, have been criticised,^[3] his central contention – that concepts of ‘childhood’ varied and that European children’s worlds had not always been so separate from those of adults – had a huge influence on the development of ‘childhood studies’. This is a multi-disciplinary field, in which anthropologists have engaged with sociologists, geographers, historians, and others arguing for a new paradigm for the study of childhood as a social construction.^[4]

Not only do constructions of childhood vary across space and time, but childhood also intersects with other variables, such as social class, gender, and ethnicity. It has been argued that economic and social realities influence ways of treating children, leading, for example, in urban Brazil to ‘two distinct forms of childhood’ (Goldstein 1998: 395). Rich children are pampered and spoiled by their parents and by the domestic workers employed to care for them. By contrast, the very children of those workers are hastened into adulthood, working inside the home from the age of 5 or 6, and sent out to do waged work by the age of 9 or 10.^[5] Childhood – in the sense of a carefree time of freedom and lack of economic responsibility – is a ‘privilege of the rich’ in this context (1998: 393). In America, too, social class shapes attitudes towards childrearing and understandings of children’s natures. The lives of preschool children in New York City have been shown to be marked by a ‘hard individualism’ of working-class communities and a ‘soft individualism’ of the upper-middle-class (Kusserow 2004). Whilst ‘hard’ individualism directs children towards tough resilience, self-sufficiency and independence, ‘soft’ individualism emphasises the importance of protecting and nurturing the child as a unique little person. Here, the conception of childhood held by upper-middle-class parents leads them to dismiss the relevance of social class, since they are led to emphasise the uniqueness and naturalness of their young children’s selves.

Socialization: becoming a cultural person

The ‘Culture and Personality’ school of American cultural anthropology, with which Mead is associated, was interested in how culturally-specific child-rearing practices shaped the emotions and personality of children as a cultural beings. Indeed, Mead herself saw the different peoples of the world as a kind of laboratory of child development, in which each culture presented a different set of experimental conditions for the treatment of children. In a short film, Bathing babies in three cultures (1951), made with Gregory Bateson, Mead showed how something as apparently straightforward as bathing a baby could be approached very differently, the method corresponding not only to the environment but also to a culturally-specific training of the young child’s emotions. Cora Du Bois, another member of this school, conducted fieldwork in the late 1930s on the Indonesian island of Alor, describing the impact of caregiving and disciplinary techniques. Relatively unusually for her time, she also analysed children’s drawings, and conducted Rorschach psychological tests. Du Bois argued that childhood experiences were central to the development of the ‘modal personality’, or common personality type, of a particular culture. However, she also acknowledged the significance of innate, individual differences in shaping adult character (1944: 3-4).

The Culture and Personality school’s interest in child development evolved into a number of cross-cultural studies of child-rearing, most notably the ‘Six cultures’ study. This ambitious project utilised a common methodology to compare ‘different patterns of child rearing and subsequent differences in personality’ (Whiting 1963: 1) in six field sites in Kenya, Mexico, the Philippines, Japan, India, and the US. Its ethnographic results were rich, with systematic attention to children’s treatment and routines, but with little attempt to make a general argument, given the significant differences between the cultures under study. Robert LeVine, an original member of the Six cultures team, continued its tradition of in-depth, observational research, examining childcare among the Gusii of Kenya from the 1950s to the 1970s. He argued that Gusii practices which diverged from those considered optimal in the US – such as not asking questions of young children, or not allowing them to initiate conversation with their elders – made sense within a local model of childhood and care (LeVine et al. 1994).

Early British anthropology was less concerned than American anthropology with psychological development, and more interested in socialization as the broad process through which immature beings became mature, competent members of a society. A generation of anthropologists trained by Bronislaw Malinowski included descriptions of children’s lives as a standard element of their ethnographic monographs. In We, the Tikopia, Raymond Firth discusses children’s care by and relationships with family members, the ‘independent little bands’ of children that work and play together, and children’s role in helping households run smoothly’, given their obedience to adult instruction (1936: 145-150). In Chisungu, Audrey Richards (1956) analysed a series of ritual acts and physical challenges for Bemba girls, one of a number of studies of initiation rituals and their role in the socialization of children. This work showed how the ‘end’ of childhood, and the attainment of adulthood, was not necessarily a natural event, but had to be achieved through ritual means. Studies of children’s position and role within the family also drew attention to the impacts of birth order (Firth 1956, Fortes 1974) and fostering arrangements (Goody & Goody 1967) on children’s treatment.

In linguistic anthropology, a number of anthropologists have focused on ‘language socialization’, the ways in which children are socialised to use language in different societies, and the ways that this shapes children’s development. Elinor Ochs and Bambi Schieffelin (1984) outline and compare three different ‘developmental stories’ with respect to infants’ language socialization. The first of these, the ‘Anglo-American white middle-class developmental story’ (the ‘story’ taken as standard in much psychological literature), involves an approach to infants as fully communicative partners. This cultural context encourages face-to-face interactions and mutual gazing between infants and caregivers, simplification of speech by adults (‘baby talk’), and the rich interpretation of infant vocalizations. By contrast, the second such ‘story’, found amongst the Kaluli of Papua New Guinea, emphasises the ‘softness’ and lack of understanding of infants. Here, infant utterances are not interpreted, and babies are not spoken to in ‘baby talk’.^[6]Instead, Kaluli caregivers turn their babies outward towards the social group, and speak ‘for’ their infant, often in a high-pitched, nasalized voice. Finally, according to the ‘Samoan developmental story’, young infants are also not conversational partners; neither babbling nor baby-talk are encouraged, and children must instead be socialised to show ‘respect’ by always considering the perspective of higher-ranking persons. Based on these stories (and their attendant constructions of early childhood), Schieffelin and Ochs argue that societies can be divided into two main types: those (such as white Anglo-American society) that adapt situations to the child, and societies (such as Kaluli and Samoa) that try to adapt the child to situations.

Amongst the Beng of rural Côte D’Ivoire, infants are thought to be reincarnated ancestors emerging from an ‘afterlife’ called wrugbe (Gottlieb 2004). This spiritual journey is a long and difficult one, and therefore infants and young children are thought to have a fragile hold on life. Gottlieb considers Beng infants’ social lives to be strikingly active when compared with babies in her native US. Though her research moves beyond earlier concerns with culturally-specific personality development, Gottlieb nevertheless sees the Beng emphasis on infant sociability as shaping children’s emotional responses in distinctive ways. In particular, and as a result of extensive alloparenting (care by those other than parents), Beng babies do not have exclusive or intensive attachments to their mother, something that might be seen as part of ‘healthy’ development in Western settings. Similarly, in Inuit morality play (1998), an ethnography of a three-year-old girl, Jean Briggs approaches young children’s actions and experiences as part of a complex social world shared with various adults. Briggs argues that Inuit adults encourage children to think deeply about moral issues by presenting them with emotionally powerful problems in an exaggerated and personally relevant style. This takes several forms, most notably the asking (by neighbours and kin) of dangerous questions – ‘Will you come and live with me?’ ‘Shall I be your new mother?’ ‘Shall I kill your father?’ – often in a sustained ‘interrogation’. Through these complex, playful dramas, Inuit adults test children, experiment with their developing emotions, and help them learn to control their behaviour in specific ways.

Knowledge and learning

Anthropological research with children has always been interested in ‘education’ in its broadest sense. Childhood, from this perspective, is interesting because it is the crucial period during which cultural knowledge is re-constituted, and possibly negotiated, by children. Although adults sometimes explicitly instruct children in particular ideas or practices, much of this learning takes place in an unconscious, embodied way. Raymond Firth saw ‘education’ in Tikopia as practical and non-disciplinary, ‘hinging upon the participation of the child in all ordinary activities from early years’ (1936: 147). Similarly, in Social and psychological aspects of education in Taleland (1938), Meyer Fortes emphasised how Tallensi children, unlike many British children of his time, did not exist in a differentiated ‘children’s sphere’. Rather, they shared the same activities and knowledge as adults, allowing them full participation in economic, ritual, and religious life. Fortes’s text gives a rich account of children’s everyday education as they take part in agricultural tasks, look after livestock, join ceremonies and dances, and joke with grandparents. He argued that children in this rural society rarely asked ‘why’ questions, since so much of their learning took place in real situations where they directly observed and practised skills.

Earlier work within the socialization frame tended to focus on childrearing by adults as a way in which (relatively passive) children were moulded. By contrast, more explicitly ‘child-focused’ ethnographies approach children not simply as adults-in-the-making but as social agents in the present. Such work gives more space to what children say and know, and the ways in which this might be different to what they are told by adults. In The private worlds of dying children (1978), Myra Bluebond-Langner describes how, as their illness progresses, leukemic children come to learn about the world of the hospital in which they are treated, about their parents’ desires, and about their own grim prognoses. Bluebond-Langner argues that American childhood is commonly understood as ‘a period of formation, of becoming’ in which children are ‘molded for their futures’ (1978: 210). This concept explains the reluctance of both medical personnel and children’s parents to talk explicitly to the children about their condition and treatment. Although these children still manage, through close observation, to gather accurate information about disease and death, they must practise what Bluebond-Langner calls ‘the rules of mutual pretense’ in order not to disrupt the ‘illusion of their normalcy’ (1978: 213). In pretending not to know that they are dying, the children demonstrate their social competence, upholding the future-oriented concept of childhood, and protecting both their parents and their doctors.

Other studies have also explored this disjunction between (limited) adult instruction and (extensive) child knowledge. Peggy Froerer (2011) argues that, in a tribal village in rural Chhattisgarh, central India, children are never systematically taught moral lessons in right and wrong. Nevertheless, as peripheral participants at adult-centred rituals, children pick up moral understandings, which they then utilise in response to illness. In the village, illnesses may be considered ‘simple’ and morally neutral, or may be considered to be ‘supernatural’ punishments for moral infractions. Adults state very explicitly that they do not consider children capable of causing “supernatural” illness, whether in themselves or others, since prior to marriage they are not thought to have acquired full knowledge (Froerer 2011: 376). However, children have a different understanding of their knowledge and capabilities and consider themselves to be responsible for illnesses caused by ritual or other misdeeds. This example shows how children do not simply reproduce or replicate the ideas of adult social actors (who are often dismissive of children’s explanations), but have their own perspective on moral responsibility, actively applying adult understandings to their own behaviours. More broadly, some anthropologists argue that it is only by studying how children come to make sense of particular concepts, such as hierarchy or ethnicity, that adult knowledge can be properly understood (Toren 1993, Astuti 2001).

Children’s abilities to only partially accept the messages of adults regarding child competencies are also demonstrated in work on language use. On the Caribbean island of Dominica, a complex, multilingual situation exists, where English (the official language of government and school) appears to be squeezing out the local Afro-French creole, Patwa (Paugh 2012). Adults, who want their children to master English, forbid them to speak Patwa, even as adults use Patwa in their own interactions, or even sometimes to instruct children. Nevertheless, ethnographic attention to micro-level, playful interactions between siblings and peers in ‘child-controlled settings’, shows how Patwa remains an important language for children. Whilst it may be forbidden to them, the fact that children hear Patwa used by adults in ‘affect-laden socializing activities’ means that children use the language in specific ways amongst themselves, most notably to ‘intensify their speech and control others’ (Paugh 2012: 19). This work is informed by the tradition of language socialization described above, but shows the significance of children’s talk within a multi-lingual context where language use carries complex socio-political messages.

Formal schooling and new models of childhood

The spread of formal schooling around the world has brought with it new models of the place and work of childhood. Significantly, one consequence of the spread of formal schooling noted in much anthropological work is a disconnect between the knowledge and skills valued in school, and locally-valued, culturally-specific skills and knowledge. For example, the introduction of formal schooling amongst the Huaorani of the Ecuadorian Amazon has led to a striking contrast between the spaces of schooling and the social environments in which children are raised (Rival 1996). Attending school gives these children few transferable skills, whilst spending time away from the forest and longhouse deskills them in the knowledge essential to Huaorani cultural and economic life. This gap, or disconnect, between school and children’s home environments was central to Pierre Bourdieu and Jean-Claude Passeron’s (1977) study of French schooling and inequality. They see the French educational system as reproducing wider social hierarchies by valuing the cultural capital (forms of speech, manners, and ways of behaving learnt unconsciously in a home environment) of children from upper-middle-class backgrounds and devaluing the cultural capital of lower-class children. Schools, they argue, make middle-class children’s cultural capital (a product of their class upbringing) appear ‘natural’, thus legitimising the reproduction of class privilege. This imposes a kind of symbolic violence (non-physical repression) on non-elite children, who develop a sense of their ‘social limits’ and begin to self-censor in the company of the elite. In ethnographies of schooling, such unofficial values and judgements are often referred to as the ‘hidden curriculum’.

Bourdieu and Passeron’s theory of the connections between schooling and social inequality has come to be known as ‘reproduction theory’, since they focus on the role of formal schooling in reproducing wider structures of inequality. However, this work often fails to consider the perspectives of the very children being marginalised in school. By contrast, Paul Willis (1977) gives more space to the ways in which working-class youth creatively struggle against the inequities of the schooling system. Learning to labour is an ethnographic study of a school in an industrial, urban setting in the English Midlands. The primary focus is ‘the lads’, a group of twelve boys who Willis describes as members of an ‘oppositional culture’ in the school. In contrast to Passeron and Bourdieu, Willis shows how the lads were not simply socialised by the institution to self-censor or to accept their subordinate position. Instead, he describes how they constantly disrupted school routines, fidgeting and tutting in class, following a ‘foot-dragging walk’ down corridors, and frequently erupting into ‘derisive or insane laughter’ at the expense of the school’s conformist pupils (1977: 13). These boys talk back to the middle-class ideologies of school, and celebrate their own working-class masculinity. Ironically, though, in choosing ‘having a laff’ (1997: 29) over conformity to the educational process, ‘the lads’ ultimately seal their own fate, leaving school without qualifications and reproducing their class position.

If this, and later, research (see especially Evans 2006) emphasises the role of class structures in shaping children’s experiences of formal schooling, other works have analysed the significance of racial and gendered aspects of identity to exclusion (see Canessa 2004). They explore, for example, how the ‘hidden curriculum’ of a Californian elementary school marginalises and isolates African-American boys, denigrating their style and body language, judging their familial forms of English as inferior, and ultimately constructing them as ‘bad boys’ (Ferguson 2000). Another ethnography of a Californian school analyses the construction and policing of high school masculinity through the ‘fag discourse’ used to attack students who (either temporarily or permanently) appear to be homosexual (Pascoe 2007). Significantly, upholding (heterosexual) masculinity is important not only to teenage students but also to the school itself, as an institution invested in rituals (school rallies, prom, yearbook photos, popularity contests) that affirm heteronormative gender roles.

In addition to highlighting the ‘hidden curriculum’ of the implicit or unintended lessons, values, and perspectives transmitted in schools, critical anthropological work on formal schooling has also explored its other impacts. One key issue is the extent to which school systems have ‘stolen’ childhood from children, turning their lives into a stressful, endless ordeal. Thus South Korean children have been described as facing an ‘examination war’, with nearly every minute of their lives organised around school or the extra classes (up to five hours a day) deemed necessary to ensure their ‘success’ (Cho 1995). Students are ‘trapped in a system that calls for intense inhuman competition and rote learning’ (1995: 154), with resultant impacts on mental and physical health. Similarly, Norma Field (1995) paints a portrait of Japanese education as ‘endless labor’, with the ordinary school day followed by ‘cram school’ in the evening. Whereas Ariès drew attention to the lack of a set-apart concept of childhood in early European history, Field highlights the ‘disappearance of childhood’ taking place in ‘an orderly, prosperous society’ (1995: 60). A further, somewhat different, critique is that formal schooling has created aspirations and expectations that, for many children, in developing contexts, are impossible to fulfil. In response, some governments have tried to create more practical school curricula for children. For example, in the late 1990s, the Ugandan government introduced a more ‘rural’ or ‘vocational’ curriculum that promoted local farming and aimed to equip children with the relevant skills for agricultural livelihoods (Meinert 1995). However, this was not well received by rural children themselves, who had hoped that going to school would enable them to pursue an urban social status. In the words of one sixteen-year-old, ‘Life in town is sweeter…. If you get stranded here in the village, you will work very hard, but life is just bitter’ (Meinert 1995: 183).

Anthropology, then, has often taken a critical perspective on formal schooling, questioning its separation from local knowledge, showing how it reproduces existing social hierarchies, and drawing attention to its frequently negative impacts on childhood experience. However, the picture drawn is not entirely negative. In rural Taiwan, and despite the disconnections between school and everyday family life, the importance of schooling is emphasised in part because schoolteachers are held up by parents as models for children to emulate (Stafford 1995). Similarly, Ethiopian schoolchildren see their teachers as inspiring figures and are strongly motivated to please them (Marshall 2016). This example is interesting for showing how the promise of better jobs and higher status in the future are not the only reasons why children might wish to attend school. In this Ethiopian case, children are motivated by the desire to be loved, valued for their hard work, and ‘respected’.

Problematising child rights

Today, the work of many international development agencies and child-focused NGOs is informed by the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child (CRC). The CRC puts forward a particular model of childhood as a time deserving of ‘special care and assistance’. Much contemporary, critical anthropological work on childhood has been concerned with exploring the implications of this universal construction of children’s individual rights, particularly in developing contexts.

Two key principles of the CRC are that, firstly, the ‘best interests’ of children should be the primary consideration in all actions concerning them (Article 3) and, secondly, a child’s views should be sought in matters affecting the child (Article 12). However, these principles are not straightforward. For example, in NGO programmes for orphans in Uganda, it is usually adults who make decisions about children’s ‘best interests’; child orphans themselves are rarely meaningfully consulted (Cheney 2017: 52-3). In Thailand, child prostitutes have become figures of concern to the international community and yet, as Heather Montgomery explores (2001a), children’s own voices and perspectives on this difficult issue are rarely heard. Montgomery conducted fieldwork in a squatter community where child prostitution had become central to maintaining precarious household incomes. Contrary to the stereotypes of activists, children in this community do not necessarily see themselves as passive victims, but emphasise that they are working to uphold a moral obligation to their parents. For Montgomery, the problem with the CRC is that it does not give clear guidance on how to prioritise or balance achieving different child rights. In order to uphold children’s ‘best interests’, she asks, whose voices should be prioritised? And how can we balance children’s right to be free of sexual exploitation with their right to family life, or to have their voices listened to? (2001b: 95)

The contradictions of child-rights-framed aid programmes have also been investigated in Vietnam (Burr 2006). One NGO-supported project in Hanoi aimed to remove children from the streets and help them return to countryside homes. However, although the program was apparently informed by the CRC, it put adult wishes before those of children, and was entirely ineffective. No provision was made to help rural families cope with the extra costs of supporting a dependent person, and so a significant percentage of the relocated children soon returned to their life in the city. The study outlines a clash between children’s own desires to work and the beliefs of (privileged) NGO workers that they should not. As many ethnographers have shown (Aptekar 1991, Glauser 1997, Hecht 1998), adult perceptions of such children as ‘out of place’ on the street are often behind misguided attempts to ‘help’ them.

Debates around ‘child labour’ (work that exploits or harms children) are also highlighted by Melanie Jacquemin (2006), who describes a child-rights-framed NGO project supporting ‘Young Female Domestics’ in the city of Abidjan, Côte D’Ivoire. This project concerned paid domestic work carried out by girls under the age of fifteen. However, by focusing only on a minority of girls known as ‘little waged maids’, the project neglected a larger category of child workers known locally as ‘little nieces’. These girls are considered foster children and often work long hours in the homes of extended family members for no pay. Indeed, Jacquemin argues that the distinction between being a family member and an employee is kept ‘purposefully blurred’ in these situations in order to ‘obscure but maximize exploitation’ (2004: 485). By focusing only on ‘child labour’ as a problem for paid workers, the project in Abidjan inadvertently contributed to local understandings (shared by the girls themselves) that what ‘little nieces’ do is not work.

Not only does Jacquemin’s research demonstrate the potentially negative impacts of heavy-handed rights-based attempts to ‘abolish’ child labour, it also chimes with other research on the gendered complexities of children’s work. In Children’s lifeworlds (1994), Olga Nieuwenhuys makes a case for taking children’s perspectives on their work seriously. Although adults in a Keralan village did not see girls’ domestic tasks as ‘work’, Nieuwenhuys discovers that the girls themselves did. She argues that discourses on child labour make light of the huge differences between the work of male and female children, where the work of the latter is productively essential but ideologically undervalued. More widely, Nieuwenhuys has problematised what she describes as the ‘dissociation of childhood from the performance of valued work’ (1996: 237), arguing that rights-based attempts to ban ‘child labour’ have the paradoxical impact of reinforcing children’s vulnerability to exploitation.

Despite attempts to globalise ‘child rights’, cultural context is key to understanding children’s particular vulnerability or resilience. Susan Shepler (2014) focuses on the demobilization (releasing from various armed forces) of former child soldiers in Sierra Leone, following the 2002 end of the country’s decade-long civil war. Shepler argues that Sierra Leoneans have their own ‘culturally specific reactions to child soldiering’ that are not reflected in global child rights discourse (2014: 16). What is most disturbing to them is not the so-called ‘lost innocence’ of child soldiers, but the disruption of village-based intergenerational relations. Shepler pays detailed attention to youth who bypassed the rights-based programmes designed to help them, and instead ‘spontaneously’ reintegrated. Ironically, although such youth do not have access to the benefits that NGOs provide, they are better able to blend back into their communities than children who are ‘formally’ reintegrated, whose ‘child soldier’ identity is often unintentionally hardened.^[7]

The politics of childhood

Debates around children’s rights and the imposition of particular expectations of children’s needs make clear that childhood is often a politically contested concept. Liisa Malkki analyses the profoundly depoliticised ways in which children’s images are utilised in ‘transnational representational spheres’ (2010: 58). For example, the figure of the child often serves to represent a ‘basic human goodness and innocence’ (2010: 60; see also Fassin 2013). However, the problem with this representation, and others, is that when children do not fit into these images, they are viewed as a ‘category mistake’. That is, they are not seen as ‘real’ children. This aspect of Malkki’s analysis helps explain a number of examples where young people’s status as children is not recognised. For example, in Zimbabwe, Brazil, and Haiti, street children have been criminalised and dehumanised as dangerous ‘others’, leaving them vulnerable to round-ups, and violent attacks, by the police (Bourdillon 1994, Scheper-Hughes & Hoffman 1998, Kovats-Bernat 2006). In the UK, immigration officials may disqualify those seeking political asylum from the category of ‘children’ because ‘real’ children are assumed to be apolitical (Crawley 2009: 99). In Sabah, East Malaysia, the Malaysian-born children of migrant workers are seen by the wider society as ‘impossible children’ since they have been born to people who are meant to be temporary, and whose families are meant to reside elsewhere (Allerton 2018).

Since the publication of Mead’s Coming of age in Samoa, several anthropologists have utilised the ‘coming of age’ genre to explore how children negotiate new expectations and experiences in rapidly changing social conditions (Markowitz 2000, Fong 2004). This work demonstrates the micro-political and emotional impact on children of inter-generational change. For example, in traditional Canadian Inuit society, ‘adolescence’, as it is commonly understood, did not exist. Instead, through constant intergenerational contact, children reached social and economic maturity at a relatively young age (Condon 1990). As the previously nomadic Inuit have become concentrated in settlements, and with the introduction of formal schooling and television, adolescence has gradually emerged as a new category of childhood experience. In the settlement, older children are less reliant on their families, and able to spend more time with groups of peers. However, the pressures of new social and economic expectations, combined with the loss of cultural and linguistic traditions, have led to an increase in drinking, violence, and youth suicide (Condon 1990: 276; see also Stevenson 2009).

Ethnographies of transnational migration and kinship have also described the impact on children’s lives of social and economic change. In Children of global migration (2005), Rhacel Salazar Parreñas examines the lives of children ‘left behind’ in the Philippines by migrant parents. Amongst children of migrant mothers, a discourse of ‘abandonment’ was particularly prominent, and children expressed emotions of longing, grief, and anger about their situation. Parreñas argues that the ‘gender paradox of globalization’, in which women are pushed to work outside the home even whilst they are still held to the ideal standard of a nurturing and physically intimate mother, has mostly negative psychological consequences for children. By contrast, in her study of Ghanaian transnational families, Cati Coe (2014) describes how the West African region has a long history of ‘fostering’ in which children ‘circulate’ between different households. Here, migration is an ever-present possibility in children’s lives. Nevertheless, even in this context, there is still a marked contrast between the views of adults and children. Whilst parents tend to be relatively upbeat in their representations of migration, children’s emotional responses to their living arrangements in Ghana reveal feelings of a lack of control over their situation.

However, despite the often-negative impacts on children of social change, and of new expectations of childhood, care, and kinship, children often respond positively to social transformations. In a Palestinian refugee camp in Jordan, children are compelled to engage with different projects of (Palestinian and Jordanian) nationalism, as well as the transnational Islamist movement (Hart 2002). However, they do so creatively, reshaping and resisting different influences and sentiments where possible. For example, one 12-year-old girl, Muna, identifies strongly as ‘Palestinian’, and is concerned about religion, but also supports a Jordanian football club and enjoys aspects of Western TV and pop music. Muna’s response to multiple cultural and religious influences is illustrative of children’s ability to imagine themselves as belonging to more than one community, and to respond in dynamic ways to political discourses.

Conclusion

Anthropological research has shown how childhood varies across space and time, how it involves different expectations of young people of different ages, how it intersects with other variables such as social class, and how it shapes children’s everyday experiences. Although many earlier anthropological studies were interested in childhood for what it revealed about the cultural formation of personality, or the socialization of young people into social roles, later work has moved away from a narrow focus on children as simply adults-in-the-making. Ethnographies that take children’s own knowledge seriously have explored children’s own cultural perspectives, and their ability to creatively respond to linguistic, social, and economic change. Even as arguments are made about the ‘disappearance’ of childhood in contexts of contemporary formal schooling, economic exploitation, or armed conflict, children often demonstrate considerable resilience.

One powerful finding of child-focused ethnography, as seen in Bluebond-Langner’s research with terminally ill children, is that children are often very aware of the realities from which adults may try to shield them. This is why understanding concepts of childhood is a central task in appreciating the realities of children’s lives. As Donna Lanclos notes in her study of play in Belfast, children ‘do not passively accept the definitions of “child” that are imposed from without’ (2003: 48). In their language use, their jokes, or their interpretation of illness, they may subtly resist adult perspectives on childhood. This resistance is nicely illustrated by Danish toddlers who are bussed out of the city to attend ‘nature kindergartens’ (Gulløv 2003). Whilst their parents see these natural spaces as the proper place of childhood, some of the children complain about the cold and lack of toys. Anthropological research shows how, even when we think we are acting in children’s best interests, we may be imposing our own understandings of childhood on them.

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Note on contributor

Catherine Allerton teaches anthropology at the London School of Economics. She is a specialist in island Southeast Asia, with research interests in children and childhoods, migration, kinship, place, and landscape. She has conducted fieldwork in rural Flores, Eastern Indonesia, and in Kota Kinabalu, the capital city of Sabah, East Malaysia.

Dr Catherine Allerton, Department of Anthropology, London School of Economics, Houghton St, London WC2A 2AE, United Kingdom. c.l.allerton@lse.ac.uk

[1] This article draws in part on material published in ‘Guide to further reading’ (2016) in Children: ethnographic encounters (ed.) C. Allerton, London: Bloomsbury Academic.

[2] For a critical feminist approach to mainstream theories of child development that draws particular attention to their impact on everyday family lives, see Burman (1994).

[3] For example, Nicholas Orme, in Medieval children (2001), refutes the idea of the nonexistence of ‘childhood’ as a distinct phase of life in the Middle Ages, drawing on evidence of parents who grieved intensely for sick or dead children.

[4] The central text in outlining this paradigm is Constructing and reconstructing childhood (1990) by Allison James and Alan Prout, which emphasises the importance of studying children’s social relationships and knowledge in and of themselves.

[5] Nancy Scheper-Hughes (1993) has also shown the impact of state neglect and poverty on the ability of Brazilian mothers to care for their infants.

[6] This strongly contradicts the arguments of those, such as Colwyn Trevarthen (1988), who argue that the use of simplified ‘baby talk’ is a universal, innate response to infants.

[7] Research with ‘child soldiers’ has also questioned the application of the (adult) psychiatric condition of post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) as a way to understand their responses and wellbeing (Boyden & de Berry 2004: xiii).

Hunting and gathering

Felix Stein — Mon, 18 May 2020 20:59:23 +0000

Thomas Widlok

University of Cologne

Initially published 18 May 2020

http://doi.org/10.29164/20hunt

Abstract:

Hunting and gathering constitute the oldest human mode of making a living, and the only one for which there is an uninterrupted record from human origins to the present. Correspondingly, there has been a lot of anthropological attention devoted to hunting and gathering with an initial confidence that one could directly observe human nature by studying hunter-gatherers. More recently, however, anthropologists have grown cautious not to draw analogies between present-day hunter-gatherers and those of the distant past too quickly. They also do not focus on hunting and gathering as isolated activities, but rather on the socio-cultural formations that have been found to be associated with them. Despite considerable regional diversity, there are recurrent themes in hunter-gatherer ethnography that show shared patterns beyond the ecology of foraging. Prominent is the notion of hunter-gatherers being ‘originally affluent’ with a relatively low workload. Hunter-gatherers have also been associated with a high incidence of gender and age equality, due to levelling practices such as sharing. Most hunter-gatherers live in very small groups, characterised by multirelational kinship ties. They often have distinct forms of environmental perception, and it has been suggested that they display a high degree of playfulness in ritual affairs. They therefore provide comparative insights in a wide-range of domains far beyond the activities of hunting and gathering.

Introduction: Not everyone who hunts or gathers is a hunter-gatherer

Hunting and gathering as activities have been with humans for all of human evolution up to today. For more than 99% of their time on earth, humans have gained their sustenance through animal and plant food that they hunted and gathered (Lee & DeVore 1968: 3). Even so-called ‘herders’ and ‘farmers’ (or ‘pastoralists’ and ‘agriculturalists’ as they are often called) have historically tended to spend some of their time hunting and gathering. Especially in harsh times, for instance when drought threatens domesticated animals or harvests, herders and farmers include hunted game and undomesticated plant foods in their diet.

At the same time, many herders and farmers all over the world tend to look down on people who live almost exclusively on hunting and gathering, because this way of life often differs not only in how food is gained, but in many other ways, too. The rituals and beliefs of people who specialise in hunting and gathering are often distinct from those of herders and farmers, as are their social rules and norms. They frequently have their own views about leadership, about whom one should marry, how one should bring up children, what a settlement should look like, which rules one should follow with regard to holding and inheriting property, with regard to sharing and pooling resources, and so forth. Therefore, despite the fact that hunting and gathering activities are often combined with other economic pursuits, anthropologists refer collectively to people who rely exclusively (or largely) on hunted game and on gathered plant food as ‘hunter-gatherers’ to acknowledge that there is ‘a distinct hunter-gatherer way of life’ that distinguishes them from their neighbours (see Kelly 2013). Often that way of life is not recognised, and hunter-gatherers are stigmatised because of it. This entry outlines some of the social practices that constitute this way of life and some of the cultural variety to be found across continents. It does not cover all instances of hunting and gathering activities at all times and places around the world, but it will focus on key case studies with only some comparative reference to more outlying examples such as the hunting practiced amongst the European nobility or the collecting of food amongst urban dumpster-divers. In short, this entry is not so much about ‘hunter-gatherers’ as a category of people than about ‘hunter-gatherer situations’ (Widlok 2016) that we find repeatedly across space and time.

The ecology of foraging and the history of hunting and gathering

The term ‘foraging’ is occasionally also used when referring to people who hunt and gather (Lee 1979). It directly, or at least implicitly, emphasises the continuity between human hunter-gatherers and foraging as it is practiced by animals or was practiced by humans other than Homo sapiens (for instance by the Neanderthals). For this reason, the term is rejected by some scholars and explicitly embraced by others. As activities, hunting and gathering pre-date modern humans because all their predecessors have exclusively lived on various types of hunting, gathering, and fishing. How similar or dissimilar these predecessors were from the human hunter-gatherers that live today is a major point of scientific debate. For those studying the remote past, any human living by hunting and gathering today (or in the recent, scientifically-documented past) provides a chance to learn more about what life might have been like in a deep past. Conversely, hunter-gatherer studies can help to construct models that attempt to understand the links between various natural environments and the spectrum of human lifeways. This can, in turn, help us understand current or recent hunter-gatherer situations.

That said, over the last decades there have been growing doubts as to whether what is known about hunter-gatherers through ethnography – that is, through reports by those who have gone to live with them – is a reliable model for reconstructing the ecology of foraging in the remote past, and the other way round. There is growing consensus that the lives of hunter-gatherers are not strictly determined by ecology or by factors detached from human cultural agency while ecological dependencies continue to be underrated with regard to non-hunter-gatherers. In any case, anthropologists have grown much more cautious when claiming analogies with the remote past or with animal behaviour, not least because such analogies have often been used in efforts of colonial domination (Gordon 1992). Moreover, considerable variation and flexibility exist in hunter-gatherer lifeways not only across environments but even within the same type of environment (see Kent 2002, Lee & Daly 1999). Despite striking similarities, life in the Australian deserts is not the same as life in deserts in Africa and elsewhere. The same holds for hunter-gatherers living in savannas, tropical forests, or tundras. An elaborate mythical and ritual attachment to land, for instance, has its very specific history in Australia, not matched in Africa but with regional continuities beyond indigenous Australia (see Swain 1993). At the same time, a high degree of mobility and small but flexible group size is found across the forager spectrum (Kelly 1995). It is important to point out that every ethnographic case documents a collective cultural achievement that has grown historically across many generations. Moreover, every environment inhabited by humans (foraging or not) has been altered by human impact so that hunter-gatherers, too, live in a cultural environment as much as in a natural one. The use of fire by hunter-gatherers, for example, is likely to have been a major transformative power in many natural environments (see Jones 1969).

Reducing hunter-gatherer life to ecology is as problematic as excluding ecology as irrelevant from other modes of life. Take mobility as an example: hunter-gatherers often move regularly within a certain territory. This mobility is a major strategy for dealing effectively with changes in the environment and with seasonal shortages of resources. However, mobility patterns are not only governed by ecological reasons alone. In many instances, they are also social. People resolve or avoid conflicts and social tension by splitting up and moving away from one another. Conversely, they create and maintain social bonds by visiting one another and by staying together. Moreover, hunter-gatherers often move before resources are depleted, in the search for food variety but also because they long to revisit places they have not been to for a while (see Widlok 2015). The movement is different – in its ecological impact and in terms of social relevance – from those of farmers and herders who may constantly be on the lookout for new pastures in unknown territory (see Brody 2000). Among hunter-gatherers, one can typically observe a fission and fusion pattern as people aggregate into larger groups and split up again periodically or seasonally. This pattern is often influenced by fluctuations in the availability of resources (migrating herds, fruit seasons, rainfall variability) but also by social needs, such as visiting known places. It is different from the pattern of outmigration in expanding farming or industrial societies. Mobility practices are therefore not only governed by ecology but they are also a matter of longing for others, of teaming up for rituals, but also for enjoying the personal autonomy of deciding whether one wants to stay or to leave. Much of the contemporary literature in social anthropology therefore concentrates on the social practices of living hunter-gatherers, while in archaeology and evolutionary studies the emphasis is on long-term ecological pressures and adaptations. It is important to note, however, that what is shared among hunter-gatherer groups in comparison with non-foragers and what is locally specific to them has both an ecological and a cultural dimension.

The original affluent society?

Early ideas about hunter-gatherers were hampered by the fact that, by the time that professional ethnographers arrived on the scene in the twentieth century, most hunter-gatherers had been decimated and relegated to remote places. Moreover, many early accounts by European explorers were not based on first-hand observation but on second-hand information provided by dominant farmers and herders that was strongly coloured by their negative attitudes towards foragers, whom they considered to lead a harsh and undesirable life. When ethnographers were able to show that this was not the case (see Altman 1987), this realization – that hunter-gatherers often did not lead the miserable life of desperate poverty that farmers and herders (and early scholars) imagined – became one of the first major insights and intriguing findings of hunter-gatherer studies that continues to inform social thought. The discussion became widely known under the notion of ‘the original affluent society’, coined by Marshall Sahlins (1988). Sahlins relied on time-allocation studies suggesting that hunter-gatherers spend less time on work than people practicing agriculture. This made modern working-hours look less like a unique achievement of Western civilization than a return to what we had before the so-called Neolithic revolution. These findings flagged the drudgery and labour-intensive economic regimes that industrialization had introduced into (most) people’s lives. A rich discussion followed (see Gowdy 1998), highlighting that the affluence of hunter-gatherers is in most cases not to be confused with abundance. Instead of continuously increasing production and maximising output, the main strategy of hunter-gatherers is to accept low production goals and optimise the distribution and use of resources. Instead of seeking to maximise individual material gains, many hunter-gatherers seemed to focus on allowing for plenty of time for leisure, ritual, social relations, and entertainment. Social practices such as sharing (discussed below) and mobility allowed greater access to resources than amongst sedentary people with exclusive property regimes. Not surprisingly, many alternative and post-materialist circles today are attracted to such a way of life.

However, it is important to note that the degree of affluence and its socio-cultural repercussions vary considerably. In drier climates, occasional hardships and food shortages occur more often than in rainforests. In lower latitudes, there is a strong seasonal element, resulting in shifts between more concentrated (and arguably more hierarchical) settlements in the summer months and more dispersed (and arguably more precarious) living during the winter (Mauss 2004 [1904-5]). More importantly, in some places like America’s northwest coast, economies based on hunting, gathering, and fishing provided enough sustenance to allow for permanent settlements. As Brian Hayden (1984) argues, in some places enough surplus food could be converted into more hierarchical social structures through exchange and redistribution feasts to eventually lead to ranks, leaders, and clans, which were effectively avoided by most hunter-gatherers elsewhere. While sharing is a main strategy to facilitate resource access and enable equality, large-scale exchange networks and ceremonial, competitive exchange systems (like the potlatch feasts among northwest coast Indians) enabled hierarchy. In other words, major transformations in socio-political life, including the introduction of inequality and strong leadership positions, of inheritance and succession via descent, etc., may not have taken place as a consequence of the introduction of agriculture. They may have been already taking place within the hunter-gatherer spectrum.

This observation has led to a number of attempts to create sub-categories within the hunter-gatherer spectrum and to emphasise the diversity among foraging groups. Amongst the various attempts to distinguish ‘simple’ from ‘complex’ hunter-gatherers, the distinction between ‘immediate-return’ and ‘delayed-return’ foragers (Woodburn 1998) has been most productive. While ‘immediate-return’ groups tend to consume the fruits of their labour more or less right away, ‘delayed-return’ groups may invest in land, infrastructure, and people that provide returns at a later stage. The point of departure of this distinction is that hunter-gatherer societies are integrated systems, so that an economic transformation may involve a number of socio-political transformations. Transitioning from immediate-return to delayed-return thus involves creating a strong sense of personal property and of social institutions (corporate groups and leadership positions) that protect property between the moment of investment and the moment of return. More recently, other aspects of this integrated system have been studied in greater detail, above all the ideational (or ontological) confidence that immediate-return hunter-gatherers have in their ‘giving environment’ (Bird-David 1990), and the corresponding notions of distributed creativity and performative sociality (see Lewis 2015). Immediate-return systems, it is argued, do not just allow for confidence in being able to make a living tomorrow, but they also free up time and energy that is then spent on art, music, and on engaging intimately with children and with one another. All of these studies underline that the seemingly ‘simple’ systems are in fact, in many ways, rather complex and intrinsically subject to historical and geographical variation. The following paragraphs will briefly outline key aspects of this complexity by dealing with equality, kinship, and ritual.

Hunter-gatherers and (in)equality

Biased views towards hunter-gatherers typically point out that they ‘lack’ several features that dominate the lives of observers, e.g. strong leaders, religious specialists, large edifices, codified laws, written literature, and formal institutions. The counter-movement has been to emphasise what hunter-gatherers have preserved (and which got lost in other contexts), for instance: equality, personal autonomy, freedom of movement, ecological harmony - with a danger of romanticising forager society as the inverse image of conditions found elsewhere. Much of the task of the anthropology of hunter-gatherers has been to debunk false assumptions leading into either of these directions. With regard to the question of equality, ethnographers have pointed out that it is not a given state of affairs amongst hunter-gatherers (and anyone else). The primate heritage seems to be characterised by widespread hierarchy (see Boehm 1993) from which human foragers managed to break away. Having few material possessions or moving places frequently is not a guarantee for equality. Whatever the material conditions, particular cultural lifeways have to develop for egalitarianism to be transmitted across generations. In other words, equality among humans is not a default that does not require any historically grown socio-cultural practices (see Widlok & Tadesse 2005).

Quite to the contrary, any successful form of equality is typically achieved by a host of practices that are generally known as ‘levelling practices’, techniques that prevent individuals from becoming dominant; from converting, for instance, hunting success into lasting asymmetric dependencies and more generally from creating and accumulating capital in the hands of particular individuals or groups. Sharing, and specifically ‘demand sharing’, is a common strategy that regularly diffuses any inequalities between those who happen to have more than others (Peterson 1993, see also Widlok 2017). ‘Demand sharing’, closely related to ‘tolerated scrounging’, allows those in need to take initiative in the (re-) distribution of goods. Instead of waiting for an alm that may (or may not) be given according to the discretion of the giver, forms of demand sharing are a morally accepted and socially expected behaviour among many hunter-gatherers. It typically requires the owner to justify why something may be kept. It also makes hoarding difficult and often asking can be done implicitly, via a silent demand of a gesture or simple taking. Another example of levelling practices is gambling, such as the gambling of arrows among the Hadza, a group of a few hundred hunter-gatherers in Tanzania (Wooburn 1988). Here, arrows are the stakes in gambling games, which result in any hunter carrying arrows of other men in his quiver, which in turn has implications for meat distribution. Since the maker of an arrow can make claims on game shot with his arrow, this means that the more successful hunters regularly have to give up meat to others. Gambling is also widespread in Aboriginal Australia and those who gain are expected to play until inequalities even out. Another levelling practice is known as ‘insulting the meat’ and has been documented for the !Kung, the largest and best-known group of southern African hunter-gatherers (Lee 2003). Here, the meat provided by a hunter is systematically and rigorously talked about in negative terms (‘insulted’) which prevents hunters from boasting and exploiting their hunting luck for the domination of others, and for creating personal dependencies and obligations to them. A model known as ‘reverse dominance hierarchy’ (Boehm 1993) suggests that these egalitarian systems are actually not free of attempts to dominate, but that equality is maintained through strategies of the many who are dominating those few who otherwise would rise to positions of domination. There are, therefore, a number of informal social institutions that, when taken together, nudge people towards more equal relations and away from more hierarchical ones: mobility patterns allow people to ‘vote with their feet’ by avoiding lasting dependencies, as people cannot be forced to stay. Rituals strengthen communal bonds rather than individual specialists. And systems of universal and performative kinship avoid strong lineages emerging. Not all of these strategies are found in all hunter-gatherer societies. However, hunter-gatherers are characterised by bundles of levelling practices, and the resilience and reappearance of hunter-gatherer societies relies to a large extent on these levelling practices being kept in place across generations. Conversely, we are now in a better position to explain why there are (sub)cultures in which some hunting and gathering are practiced, but which on the whole look very different from the majority of what we call hunter-gatherer societies.

Hunting outside the context of hunter-gatherer societies has both continuities and discontinuities with what we find in the hunter-gatherer contexts. Hunting involves the taking of a life; it invokes the unintelligibility of death, of killing, and of having to kill in order to live. Therefore, the relationship to the animal killed and the hunting practices are universally marked and hedged by ritual acts and special uses of language – including in ‘modern’ hunting. Nevertheless, two instances of hunting, however similar they may be in outward appearance, can involve rather different political institutions and different spiritual connotations. In the more recent history of Europe and its colonial satellites, hunting is closely associated with privilege and hierarchy. The landholding gentry held hunting rights over its large stretches of land which turned hunting into a symbol for (over-)lordship and domination. It also created the poacher as someone who not only illegally hunts but who also defies the sovereignty of kings, clergy, and lordships and who is consequently threatened with extremely harsh penalties (see Thompson 1975). The connection between hunting and ruling has been intimate across a large spectrum of modern political systems including fascist, communist, and colonial rulers, and it continues to be a strong marker of social distinction and power. In many ex-colonies, the nation-state and its representatives consider themselves to be the owners of wild animals (and sometimes of wild plants, too). This often automatically criminalises indigenous hunter-gatherers and has frequently led to the expulsion of local people from wildlife reserves based on an ideology of categorically separating people from wildlife.

Since hunting in European nation-states and in the colonies is associated with power-holders and domination, it is very different from the socio-political embedding found amongst hunter-gatherers. This is not only true in economic and political terms, but also with regard to the relationship between hunters and environment, particularly their prey. In his study Grateful prey, Robert Brightman (1993) gives a detailed account of the religious ideas and hunting strategies of subarctic indigenous hunters, in this case of the Cree Indians of the Hudson Bay. Here, the notion of the game animal as offering itself to the hunter, who in turn has a responsibility for that animal, is widespread. Animals are considered to be, in some respects, like humans, and in other respects seen as unlike humans, as depending on them but also as a potential spiritual threat. The personalization of the prey is deeply ambivalent. Rane Willerslev, in his ethnography of indigenous people of northeastern Siberia (2007) also underlines the point that hunting in these instances is never straightforwardly utilitarian, since there is an important spiritual dimension to it, stemming from the giving and taking of life. As in personal relationships, the exchange between humans and their environment is often conditional. It depends on performative skills and mutual atunement, including a degree of tricking, deception, and retribution, as well as gratefulness and respect (see Breyer & Widlok 2018). These ambivalent tendencies tend to culminate as part of hunting, which elevates this practice for hunter-gatherers to more than just a way of getting meat or of passing their time.

Gatherers, gender and comparisons

A broadly parallel picture emerges with regard to gathering and collecting wild foodstuff. There are two aspects to this: firstly, it has been pointed out that in terms of food quantity, nutrition, and food security, gathering undomesticated plant food is much more important to hunter-gatherers than the hunt, even though ideologically there is commonly an emphasis on game meat. Scholarly preoccupation with the hunting aspect of the hunter-gatherer way of life may therefore be biased, since at least in terms of quantity, gathering is in many settings the main means of survival. Since it is mostly women who concentrate on gathering, the old picture of ‘man the hunter’ (Lee & DeVore 1986) began to be complemented by that of ‘woman the gatherer’ (Dahlberg 1981). This is an oversimplification, since even men who go out hunting often return with gathered fruits (rather than meat) while women’s gathering may include capturing small animals such as lizards and birds. The line between what constitutes ‘hunting’, and who is involved in it, thereby becomes more blurred than anticipated (Kästner 2012). Without the keen observations of women reading animal tracks and movements, many hunts would not be successful. Moreover, collective hunts in forest areas often involve the whole camp, regardless of gender. Despite cases in which some of the meat may be reserved for men (or to particular relatives of the hunter), women in many hunter-gatherer societies enjoy equality that compares favourably with most other societies (see Leacock 1998). This includes their access to resources, but also their social standing and status, their autonomy in making decisions (for instance, in cases of infanticide) and their room for agency. Men, on the other hand, often engage in what may be considered ‘female’ activities, not just gathering but also looking after children (see Hewlett 1991). Despite a frequently observed division of labour, women and men are often equally involved in relevant practices, including economic decisions, politics, healing, and ritual affairs. This point has been particularly intensively debated with regard to the case of Aboriginal Australia where senior initiated men tend to be seen as the guardians of secret-sacred knowledge. Here, more recent studies have shown how women influence rituals from which they are formally excluded, so that kinship relations may override gender in ritual (Dussard 2000). More generally, ritual among hunter-gatherers is considered to be an integral part of making a living off the land (see below).

Although in comparison to hunting, gathering has been somewhat under-theorised in anthropology, the term ‘collector’ is occasionally also used synonymously with hunter-gatherers (and sometimes is restricted to more sedentary foragers). Yet in most instances, the goal of gathering items is not accumulation – in contrast to the case of art collectors, hobby collectors, or ‘hoarders’ in industrial societies. Although there is a sense of ownership in what individuals gather, gathered food items are prime objects of sharing (Widlok 2017). Sometimes, items get stored – for instance, fruit may be left to ripen in underground sand borrows – but as soon as they are brought back into the open, they are subject to intense (demand) sharing. Moreover, the attitude that informs the integration of hunter-gatherers into market and labour economies seems to be informed more by their gathering than by their hunting habitus. In my own field research with ≠Akhoe Hai//om in Namibia, I have observed people who basically forage in their small gardens, checking on small quantities of ripe fruit on a daily basis rather than waiting for a day of harvest. Similarly, their taking on day-labour seems to follow very much the logic of gathering: foraging on day-labour opportunities, as it were. Several authors have therefore pointed at similarities between hunter-gatherer ways of life and those occupying niches in large-scale societies, for instance travelling artisans or so-called peripatetics who live as mobile blacksmiths or other specialists at the margins of sedentary societies (Rao 1987). One may also be inclined to include other ‘labour minorities’, such as deposit bottle collectors, dumpster-divers, day labourers, prostitutes, and others who in one way or another ‘live for the moment’ (see Day et al. 1999). It has been suggested that what connects these disparate cases is not so much the technique of generating an income, but the ‘anarchic solidarity’ (Gibson & Sillander 2011) that comes with it. This refers to a strong sense of mutual support and equality that is paired with the ability to share conventions of appropriate behaviour without a centralised authority figure or the codified rules policed by the state.

That said, there continue to be considerable differences between modern subcultures and hunter-gatherers. The former are typically integral (even though marginalised) parts of larger polities, while the latter usually enjoy a much larger degree of autonomy. While many subcultures of urban foragers are forced into their precarious positions (for an example see Rakowski 2016), most hunter-gatherers consider their way of life not to be ‘second-best’ and a matter of desperation, but rather one of considerable social and personal value that has proven its adaptability and resilience over many generations. While some subcultures may incorporate features that are also found in hunter-gatherer societies, they are in many ways only able to do so as a minority living among a majority that leads a different life. By contrast, within hunter-gatherer societies, their values and practices are practiced by all. They are the mainstream and ‘normal’, even though the size of these groups is very small indeed as they often only count a few hundred individuals. Thus, it is not only true that not everyone who hunts and gathers is living in a hunter-gatherer society, but also that hunter-gatherers share features with non-hunter-gatherers, in particular with some modern subcultures, without necessarily being as integrated into larger encompassing socio-economic systems.

The importance of extreme small-size of hunter-gatherer groups has recently been emphasised by Nurit Bird-David (2017) and it points, again, to the question of how one might compare instances of hunting and gathering across enormous stretches of scale (as well as across time and place). Interestingly, there are two major opposing positions within anthropology that, at their extreme, both discourage comparison, if for very different reasons. Those who consider hunter-gatherers to be closer to ‘human nature’ are disinclined to compare them to any other societies, since the latter are said to follow rules that are a product of a complex cultural history which are assumed to be largely absent in the case of hunter-gatherers. Those who consider today’s hunter-gatherers to be merely the impoverished product of encapsulation by dominant neighbours dispute their capacity to create and maintain foraging as a cultural system from within, and therefore also do not grant them the status of ‘independent’ cases for comparison. However, it is likely that at the heart of the matter is not an intrinsic problem of hunter-gatherer societies, but rather difficulties in the discipline of anthropology of determining what counts as ‘a case’ and of understanding what comparative method(s) entail (see Candea 2019) – and ultimately, what counts as ‘a society’, ‘a community’, or ‘an individual’. None of these terms are neutral as they are filled with assumptions – usually generated from non-hunter-gatherer situations. If the subordination of individuals to a ruling authority or structures of domination defines a society, then we may either conclude that hunter-gatherers do not live in societies or that our notion of society is not universal and broad enough to capture human relationships that bind people together across all cases. The ethnography of hunter-gatherers therefore continues to generate critical reassessments of key notions in social theory. Hunting and gathering, as Tim Ingold (2000: 313) pointed out, is not just a ‘technological regime’ independent of the social relations of those who happen to neither domesticate crops or herds. Consequently, if these groups have more in common than their subsistence techniques, this should also show in domains of life that may at first appear to be less directly connected to hunting and gathering (less, say, than sharing and human-animal interaction), such as the domains of kinship and ritual, for example.

The social relations of hunter-gatherers

Hunter-gatherers across the globe differ in their kinship systems, even though statistically bilateral kinship is encountered most frequently among them (that is, kinship as a broad network that does not strictly follow a ‘pedigree’, a line of descent). Amongst pastoralists and horticulturalists, patrilineal descent (reckoning kinship through the male line) dominates, but it also occurs among hunter-gatherers (Keesing 1975: 134). The ≠Akhoe Hai//om are a case in point insofar as they practice cross-sex naming, which means that daughters receive their father’s family name and sons receive their mother’s family name, which effectively prevents the emergence of strong descent groups, lineages, and clans as corporate agents. Moreover, like many other hunter-gatherers, ≠Akhoe Hai//om may be said to have a universal kinship system; that is to say, they readily incorporate everyone with whom they are co-resident into the kinship network so that their family formation is not fully predicated on blood-ties, unlike the American kinship system (see Schneider 1980). They disregard a strong separation between ‘matrilines’ and ‘patrilines’, and between linear and non-linear kin, for that matter. Given the overall small number of persons in this group, links between people are ‘multirelational’ (Bird-David 2017), insofar as everyone is in many overlapping relations to everyone else. The notion of being a ‘member’ in a single abstract kinship category is not common in hunter-gatherer systems. Rather, kinship may be said to be performance-based, i.e. you achieve a certain kin relation through actions that comply with the expectations for that kin relation. Practices of care can create ‘parental’ kin; practices of friendship and mutual assistance can performatively bring about ‘siblingship’. Thereby, you can become kin to someone who behaves appropriately but who may be distant from you (in terms of genetics or descent). Correspondingly, cases are reported in which those who do not share their lives anymore in a particular way can also lose their status as kin (Bird-David 2017). As mentioned earlier, this does not apply to all hunter-gatherers, but it occurs much more often in hunter-gatherer settings than it does elsewhere. Again, the Australian cases have been critical in many of these debates. This is partly because foundational texts in social thought (e.g. by Emile Durkheim or Marcel Mauss) at the beginning of the twentieth century were informed by early ethnography that came out of Australia, and to some extent North America. Another reason is the extraordinarily complex and varied structure of many Australian kinship systems. Moreover, in a very recent contribution, Doug Bird et al. (2019) have analysed Australian forager ethnography to argue that despite small residential groups, the Martu of the Western Desert of Australia are actually part of large social networks that typically involve social relationships beyond kin relatives. This undermines the widespread assumption that human sociality was conditioned exclusively in tight, small groups of ‘bands’ in human evolution. Rather, even apparently isolated foragers took part in large and complex societies linked through ritual and an expansive social network. These debates illustrate two recurrent challenges in hunter-gatherer studies and in social thought more generally: images of hunter-gatherers (and of humanity more generally) are often wrongly coloured by the assumption that their social relations are simply small-scale versions of present-day modern state societies with clear-cut social roles and individuals occupying these roles (Bird-David 2017). At the same time, images of hunter-gatherers (and of humanity more generally) are also wrongly coloured by the assumption that they are extreme cases of the closely-knit farming communities found in the immediate past of modern state societies with its villages and corporate descent groups, instead of being part of open and expansive networks (Bird et al. 2019).

The fact that some of the arrangements that characterise hunter-gatherer relationships (for instance performativity, or integration of distant people as kin) are also found in the patchwork families of modern urban societies is not, it seems, a coincidence. In both instances kinship ties are not ‘burdened’ with issues of political power, with the control of women by men and of juniors by seniors, with succession to office, or with an indispensable reliance of inherited property for living one’s life. And in both cases we find a high premium given to personal autonomy and open networks paired with an intrinsic interest in other people as particular beings rather than as representatives of social categories. Hunter-gatherer ethnography therefore provides important lessons for understanding social and cultural life, not because it is closer to an assumed natural condition but because it departs in many ways from the dominant ways of farmers and herders – while not being exceptional to the extent that a comparison would not be possible.

Rituals of hunter-gatherers

A similar summary can be made with regard to the domain of hunter-gatherer ritual. Again, some patterns emerge, but without there being a single set of religious ideas and practices associated with hunting and gathering. In fact, it has been repeatedly questioned whether the dominant idea of a religion (defined as a sacred sphere separate from the secular) holds for hunter-gatherer contexts at all. Their rituals seem to be conspicuously disconnected from any direct interaction with a distant creator-god. Rituals are typically not considered to be sacrifices or other forms of ‘striking a deal’ with deities, ancestors, or other spiritual beings. Consequently, many rituals lack the sense of devoutness and dogma. Often rituals are transacted through intergroup exchange, as in Aboriginal Australia, where a whole category of ritual activities is known as ‘travelling business’ in which ritual songs, dances, objects, and emblems have been transferred across the whole continent (Widlok 1992). Among hunter-gatherers of the central African forest, rituals are regularly paid for in such transactions. This is not seen as curtailing their power but rather amplifies their playful and emotional value (Lewis 2015). Ethnographers like Mathias Guenther (1999) have long been pointing at the degree of playfulness and flexibility that characterises hunter-gatherer life, and in particular the domains that are usually called ‘religious’. At least, this is true for many so-called ‘immediate-return systems’. In other contexts, in particular in Aboriginal Australia, transgressing or disclosing what is secret and sacred can have deadly serious consequences. The excitement of new ritual songs, dances, and objects travelling between places is part of this playfulness, but also the fact that ritual activities are often a blend between skilful art performances, entertaining group gatherings, and matters of concern such as healing and caring for the social and natural environment. This is true for ritual actions like the San trance dance, which combines healing with play entertainment and dance performance (Widlok 1999: 249). Dances that may begin as ‘just play’ can involve sincere healing, and most stories and ritual actions have an open, entertaining ‘reading’ as well as a serious, at times secluded, and powerful one. Combining serious issues with elements of ‘serious play’ is also apparent in the ‘mythical’ trickster figures that are prevalent among hunter-gatherers (and beyond). Tricksters are ambivalent not only as superhuman shape-shifters or messengers of superhuman forces, but also as tricking others and as being tricked - and as being laughed about. Where trickster stories and trance dances occur, we find parallel social and political relations of hunter-gatherer groups predicated along similar lines. Peter Gray (2009: 484) speaks of the prolonged social play in these societies as characterised by ‘voluntary participation, autonomy, equality, sharing, and consensual decision making’. At the same time, ritual has been identified as one possible entry-point for emerging inequalities (see Woodburn 2005 and other contributions in Widlok & Tadesse 2005).

Jerome Lewis has recently suggested that attraction, enjoyment, excitement, and entertainment are the main driving forces in the economy of ‘spirit play rituals’ among Mbendjele, central African forest hunter-gatherers (2015: 18). Thus, the playfulness and the role of being attracted to engaging with one another in ritual performance, which was previously considered to be little more than a side-effect, has now entered central analytical stage. Playfulness appears to be a key motivation for engaging in these rituals and for regulating the seemingly ‘anarchic’ social life of hunter-gatherers. The same pattern of play seems to inform not only what one may want to call the religious sphere but also other aspects of human life, such as sharing and ultimately even hunting itself. There seems to be a fairly close match, at least in some of the cases, between hunting practices and ritual ones: hunter-gatherers can be highly tolerant with regard to alternative opinions and interpretations, for instance when interpreting the tracks of game animals, keeping options open long into the hunt (see Liebenberg 1990). A similar acceptance of heterodoxy and flexibility with regard to contextual, situational factors is also found in the religious domain and in the domain of ethical judgements of some hunter-gatherer groups. However, a strong sense of ‘Law’ may prevail in others, above all in Aboriginal Australia and in the case of the northwest coast of America. The argument here is therefore not that there is a causal relation between hunting and religion (or vice versa) but rather that hunter-gatherers in many instances train and cultivate similar ways of going about things across these domains. The playfulness and flexibility of African hunter-gatherers is found across domains, and so are the harshness and rigidity found in both religious and kinship affairs of hunter-gatherers in Australia and the northwest coast.

Conclusions: hunting and gathering in past, present, and future

In the early stages of anthropology, the fact that hunting and gathering predates other human economic practices led to the assumption that they somehow constitute the simplest building blocks of human social life and therefore held the key for understanding humans in general or ‘human nature’. This was the view, for instance, put forward in Emile Durkheim’s book The elementary forms of religious life (Durkheim 2015 [1912]) which relies heavily on what was then known about hunter-gatherers in order to develop a general sociological theory of religion. It also applies to the early work of Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels. Many assumptions entertained by Durkheim and other early theorists about hunter-gatherer ethnography turned out to be wrong, even though – arguably – they have been able to draw interesting conclusions from them. Durkheim was wrong, for instance, to think of Australian hunter-gatherers as featuring a particularly simple religion (or society for that matter). Their mythology and their kinship systems are among the most complicated on this planet.

At the same time, studying hunter-gatherers may still lead us towards an improved understanding of religion and other aspects of cultural life. Rather than seeing religion primarily as a system of codified beliefs that lends itself to particular forms of political domination, we may conceive of it more broadly in terms of ‘serious play’. What has been pointed out for hunter-gatherer religion is also true for their economic and social practices: they are not entirely exceptional. Hunter-gatherer ways of practicing religion are reminiscent of sub-strands in other religious traditions (see Turner 1999). Hunter-gatherer ways of organising access to shared resources may inspire changes in urban or digital settings (Widlok 2017). What makes the hunter-gatherer ethnography so relevant for anthropological thought is not that it was entirely different from all other ways of life, nor that it often seems particularly attractive to post-industrial urbanites today. Rather, it is the fact that it enriches the spectrum of possible lifeways that humans have been able to bring about – and it enriches our attempts to better understand how humans create any particular socio-cultural environment in the first place.

Contemporary hunter-gatherers and their descendants face enormous difficulties when trying to maintain their way of life in an economic and political environment that is hostile to them. Their number is decreasing as dominating neighbours have forced them to give up their ways of life. Correspondingly, it becomes ever more difficult to live a hunter-gatherer life and to share that life as an ethnographer. Much anthropological work with hunter-gatherers and their descendants is therefore dealing with issues of land rights, health and education, political mobilization and participation, of maintaining local languages and culture as heritage. Hunter-gatherers themselves are increasingly involved in determining the direction of anthropological research in ways that is relevant and beneficial to them.

At the same time, hunter-gatherer studies continues to be a burgeoning field. Even seemingly abstract and ‘old-fashioned’ anthropological pursuits, such as the collection of genealogies, mapping hunting sites and trails, documenting stories and everyday language, can gain applied relevance in court cases on land rights, in revitalization programmes, and in political conflicts with states and majority populations. Moreover, existing ethnography proves to be a fertile ground from which innovative anthropological explanations continue to emerge. They may teach us about hunter-gatherer culture and what makes it intrinsically valuable, and they may enable us to look differently at other cultural traditions. Once we learn that some people perceive the cosmos as capricious and populated with whimsical powers, we find this perception not just among foragers but also elsewhere. When hunter-gatherers teach us that for some people indulgence is a value, but achieving status through distinction is not, we may not only notice this stance in the documented past before farming or in the utopias of distant futures. Rather, we may be able to better trace practices and cultural repertoires seen and realised among hunter-gatherers in a variety of contemporary contexts elsewhere. After all, the ethnography of hunting and gathering was never only about a group of strange ‘others’, it has always been about them and us as fellow humans.

References

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Note on contributor

Thomas Widlok is Professor for Cultural Anthropology of Africa at the University of Cologne. He received his PhD from the London School of Economics and is author of Living on Mangetti (1999, Oxford University Press) and of Anthropology and the economy of sharing (2017, Routledge). He has co-edited Property and equality (2005, Berghahn) and The situationality of human-animal relations (2019, Transcript-Verlag).

Prof. Dr. Thomas Widlok, African Studies, University of Cologne, Albertus-Magnus-Platz, 50923 Köln, Germany. thomas.widlok@uni-koeln.de

Professionals

Felix Stein — Tue, 21 Apr 2020 15:51:42 +0000

Elizabeth Hull

SOAS University of London

Initially published 21 Apr 2020

http://doi.org/10.29164/20pros

Abstract:

Professions are institutionalised bodies of specialised knowledge and practice around which divisions of labour within contemporary societies are organised. As well as performing a collective function, membership within a profession offers individuals upward social mobility and meritocratic recognition. Professional expertise is so ubiquitous in societies around the world that we tend not to ask how and why specialised occupational groups have emerged, how they produce, control, and apply their knowledge, and how the meanings of professionalism differ from one context to the next. Anthropologists’ early focus on colonial settings attuned them to view professionals as instruments of political power and control, particularly in biomedical contexts. Subsequent studies have produced a diverse array of interpretations, seeing professionalism as a performative or aesthetic practice that sits apart from the messy realities of work, as a marker of prestige and class mobility, and as a site of ethical engagement and debate. Recent approaches tend to focus on the ways in which professional identity is made through everyday practice and the struggles entailed in maintaining it, rather than viewing it as a label conferred automatically on the basis of training. Finally, the study of professionals has prompted renewed attention to anthropologists’ own claims to professionalism, and the social networks, institutions, and epistemic assumptions needed to sustain it.

Introduction

In a conversation between Scottish physician David Livingstone and a Tswana ritual expert in 1857, the mission doctor attempted to disprove the rainmaker’s arguments about his influence on rain. Livingstone drew on European models of empirical reason, referring to himself as the ‘medical doctor’ and to the rainmaker as ‘rain doctor’. He implied ironically that their contest of ideas was being fought on equal ontological terms (Comaroff & Comaroff 1991: 211). Thereby, Livingstone also suggested something about the way in which an incipient ideology of professionalism served as a marker of expert knowledge and authority in this colonial setting of southern Africa.

This interaction took place during a period in which the professionalisation of spheres of expertise such as medicine and law was occurring alongside the acceleration of industrial capitalism and technological development in the nineteenth century. It was aided by various institutional forms such as associations, systems of accreditation, and ethics codes, which demarcated the formal parameters of professional knowledge and served as barriers to entry. As such, professionalisation was an exclusionary process of formalising and limiting claims to expert knowledge. It standardised expertise in ways that made it quickly transportable around the world. For instance, from the late-nineteenth century, the professionalisation of medicine rendered population health amenable to state intervention. Professionalism emerged as a new form of governance, intertwined with state projects at home and in the colonies.

The study of professionalism, tied to the emergence of modern state bureaucracies, traditionally fell under the remit of sociology rather than anthropology. Key figures studying it include the sociologists Talcott Parsons and Everett Hughes, influenced by the foundational works of social theorists Max Weber and Emile Durkheim. Both Weber and Durkheim witnessed the emergence of occupational groups in Europe’s transforming societies.^[1] Durkheim had asserted early on that professionals were custodians of morality and collective interest. Professional ethics provided solidarity in an industrial society that risked moral dissolution under the sway of free market philosophy (1992). Weber focused less on professionals and more on bureaucracies, maintaining that power in society becomes legitimised and regulated by rational and depersonalised bureaucratic systems that impose rules on human behaviour.

Writing in the 1930s during a period in which society risked collapsing into fascism, Talcott Parsons, was fascinated with the question of how society’s fragile stability was maintained. He held that professions did maintain stability but differed from bureaucracies because they emphasised collegial and individualist values rather than hierarchies. Yet both bureaucracies and professions shared important commonalities: they demarcated specific, restricted functions in the workplace and they formalised standards of practice, making people’s roles distinct from their personalities and individual circumstances. For Parsons, professionals—like bureaucrats—were essential components of ‘modern’ industrial society, harbingers of rational principles holding society together through the creation of shared values and goals. Concepts of ‘mandate’ and ‘license’ were later developed and deemed necessary for professions to exist, as they formalised relationships of trust within society (Hughes 2009). As well as entrusting some of its necessary functions to these contained spheres of expertise, society could offload onto the professions responsibility for its more disturbing elements. For instance, disease would be dealt with by medical professionals and crime by lawyers (Dingwall 2008: 4–5).

By the 1970s, the idea that professionals served as a kind of ‘glue’ for social cohesion gave way increasingly to a view of professionalism as a mechanism of control and elitism. This position was exemplified in the work of French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu, who viewed professionalism as a source of power, or what he called ‘social capital’, that could be used to gain political and social status (Bourdieu 1990).

Given anthropology’s original focus on so-called ‘traditional’ societies, Parsons’ contemporaries in anthropology limited their interest in expertise to a focus on ‘ritual experts’, such as the rainmaker in Livingstone’s account. But as anthropologists turned their attention to colonial actors and to the bureaucratic workings of the state, they began to focus on professional expertise itself. Today there exists no distinct subsection of anthropology devoted to the study of professionals. Instead, work on professionalism is disparately nestled in a number of different areas, including the anthropology of expertise, science, and technology studies and the study of states, bureaucracies, and corporate settings. This entry therefore draws together some key strands from different sub-fields of the discipline. They include considering professionals as agents of social control, status, and class mobility, as well as a more recent focus on professionalism as an ethical and aspirational project.

Professionals as agents of social control

Anthropology’s early encounter with professionals, aside from within the academe itself, began in colonial settings. The study of colonialism highlighted early on that professionals are not just the benign experts they often see themselves as, but that they are also social actors embedded within colonial and other power relations. The aforementioned conversation between Livingstone and the rainmaker is a good example of this. In addition to the more overt forms of conversion, it was through assertions of professionalised expertise that the Tswana were drawn subtly and inexorably into the hegemonic structures of colonising culture (Comaroff & Comaroff 1991). Professional knowledge, religious authority, and colonial power converged to produce new regimes of domination. Medical missionaries and military doctors throughout the European colonies set out not only to ameliorate ill-health—often brought about or exacerbated by brutal labour regimes—but to ‘civilise’ colonised populations.

While medicine was a key locus of professional expertise in colonial settings, it was not the only one. In Northern Rhodesia (today’s Zambia) in the early twentieth century, colonial administrators were concerned about feeding a growing population; in particular, how to sustain rural populations while extracting the labour of male migrants who travelled for work to the mines. Worried about constraints on the self-sufficiency of ethnic groups such as the Bemba, they drew on the expertise of scientists who determined that the widely practiced agricultural method—a semi-nomadic, slash and burn system known as citimeme—was wasteful (Richards 1995 [1939]). A study by an anthropologist and a historian fifty years later revealed that a series of highly adaptive and varied aspects of citimene had been overlooked by colonial officials, tasked with the job of defining and controlling such practices (Moore & Vaughan 1994). Professional expertise in this instance reproduced narratives compatible with political agendas. The authors revealed, moreover, that the colonial preoccupation with citimene was not only to do with food supply but with how to control populations and to create permanent residences in order to implement taxation. However, the study is careful not to arrive at a singular conclusion, showing that while professional knowledge could not be taken at face value, neither could it be dismissed as mere colonial representation.

The work of the French philosopher Michel Foucault equipped anthropologists with a language to understand professionals as instruments of political power. Foucault was particularly influential in studies of medical settings. In The birth of the clinic, published in 1963, he argued that biomedical knowledge, formalised through systems of professionalism, rendered patients’ bodies passive objects of control and intervention (Foucault 2002 [1963]). His approach made it possible to describe how a ‘medical gaze’ became embroiled in systems of racialised exploitation. One ethnographic history of a mission hospital in the Belgian Congo shows that medical missionaries became ‘colonial agents of a form of indirect rule’ (Hunt 1999: 165). Nancy Rose Hunt describes the medicalisation of childbirth, in a context where concerns of colonial administrators about a falling birth rate motivated medical attention to safe childbearing. Locally trained midwives became valued professionals and important culture brokers, ‘inviting, persuading and compelling’ women to attend a clinic, despite growing fears prompted by caesarean deaths (Hunt 1999: 230-1). Notwithstanding their suspicions, local women also brought themselves to hospital during difficult births and appropriated colonial items such as soap and birth certificates to suit their needs. Colonial powers often viewed this process as a ‘civilising’ practice, using doctors in rural hospitals to implement hygiene and other state directives in what the author describes as a project of ‘medical, bodily and demographic control’ (Hunt 1999: 6). Yet through detailed descriptions of professionals such as the midwife Malia Winnie, Hunt resists straightforward arguments about colonial intrusion and local reaction. The experts in this setting – teachers, nursing men and midwives – were ‘colonial middle figures’, engaged in a process not just of control, but of cultural mediation and negotiation, such as between local and medical meanings of bodily incision. Professional practice was one of translation, ‘a necessary condition of colonial life’ (Hunt 1999: 13).

In contemporary hospital settings, ethnographic studies show how ‘professional logics’ exert control over patients. In the United Kingdom, for instance, enactments of professional identity can construct asymmetrical power relations in which patients become subordinate. ‘Professional logics’ place demands on patients, who must display ‘due deference’ to medical staff and their expertise as a prerequisite for accessing care (White et al. 2012: 78). Take the example of a distressed elderly woman who arrives in a UK Accident and Emergency (A&E) Department with a bleeding nose caused by a fall. An on-looking doctor remarks that ‘many people here have nothing wrong with them’ (White et al. 2012: 72). Since the doctor perceives the woman’s condition as too minor to require his clinical expertise, the patient is deemed undeserving of care and rendered a ‘problem’. Professional knowledge demarcates patients as either legitimate or unworthy, impeding ‘the recognition of patients as persons’ (White et al. 2012: 72).

Ethnographic attention to professional practice suggests the ways in which professional hierarchies may reproduce the kinds of ‘indifference’ (Herzfeld 1993) that have long been associated with bureaucracies. Professions are embedded within, and may help to reproduce, power relations prevalent in society.

Performance and aesthetics of professionalism

A key feature that unites studies of professionals is the attention to the work process itself. It reveals that activities involved in performing and hence maintaining one’s professional status may be quite distinct from other aspects of professional work.

In a volume on international development professionals, David Mosse describes their tendency to move towards agreement and coherence, and focuses on the political effects of such convergences. Professionals must navigate the messiness, complexities, and disagreements entailed in their everyday practice while maintaining the appearance of coherence upon which their professional identities rely. In his research about an international development intervention in India, Mosse encountered ‘a professional habitus that automatically transferred the actuality of events into the preconceived categories of legitimate meaning and ideal process’ (Mosse 2011a: 22). By reproducing models and templates, engaging in ‘group think’ (Woods 2007), or forming closed networks built around certain norms of social interaction (Eyben 2011), they can create an appearance of efficiency and disguise the complex problems encountered in daily work.

Documents are a key technology through which the official narratives of professionals are produced (Riles 2006). However, the ways that documents are used vary depending on professional cultures. In certain contexts, their creation may have as much to do with building consensus and reproducing convergence, as with the stated purpose or content of documents (Green 2011; Hull 2012). Yet, the uses of paperwork change in contexts where professionals operate with relative impunity, as work on the Nigerian gendarmerie suggests (Göpfert 2013). Gendarmes are military police operating in rural areas, responsible primarily for traffic control, public order, and criminal investigations. They closely associate their professional status with their training in writing, a skill which they perceive distinguishes them from the police and military. In criminal investigations, gendarmes produce a procès-verbal, a document containing information about events, observations, and evidence pertaining to a crime, to be transferred to a public prosecutor. In the absence of scrutiny by seniors regarding the accuracy of the reports, gendarmes produce documents that are ‘aesthetically satisfying’ and through which they express their individual identities and statuses. While adhering to the required template, they alter font, type size, spacing, and use of symbols in the place of certain letters to personalise the appearance of the document. Verbose or technical language signifies professional status. It entails translating a witness’s words in a way that prioritises the ‘dramaturgy’ of the document over the accuracy of its claims (Göpfert 2013: 330). Crucially, gendarmes operate in an environment in which professional worth is achieved through the appearance of documents, while processes ensuring the reliability of content are absent. To be a professional in this context is to perform one’s individualism and intellect through presentation and writing style.

The performance of professional status is similarly important among international development professionals, albeit taking a different form (Eyben 2011). Travelling abroad for work, development professionals are physically and socially distant from the communities they are sent to assist (Eyben 2011: 145). Instead, they encounter host countries through enclosed, elite spaces of expatriate sociality, forming friendships with one another at picnics, sporting events, and parties. It is in these spaces that meanings of professionalism are made, because socialising brings a donor community into being, a necessary step towards policy coherence. However, because these ways of socialising do not include ‘getting to know the country and its people’, these activities reproduce the gap between policy agendas and grounded realities, a well-known problem in development practice (Eyben 2011: 141). In these examples, the performance of professionalism—whether in documents or in social gatherings—is more important than the specificities of official roles that people might play.

A discourse of professionalism also provides a language for disciplining people's physical appearance at work, especially of women. In a data-entry firm in Barbados, women are expected to perform ‘professionalism’, defined by their seniors in terms of their appearance and comportment (Freeman 1993). Yet women were explicit in describing their jobs as a far cry from their understanding of ‘professional’, remarking that jobs in agricultural and domestic labour were better paid than theirs. Contradictions emerged since some women said they preferred these jobs because they liked to work in a ‘professional enterprise’. They thereby acknowledged the higher status it conferred to them, all the while recognising its façade-like quality. Here, professional identity turns out to be ambivalent, as both a source of social value and an empty signifier.

Despite their claims to meritocratic values, professions may be as likely as other kinds of labour practices to mobilise differences such as gender, ethnicity, religion, nationality, or citizenship status. This applies even to sectors we tend to think of as the most formally rational and calculative, such as finance. In London’s banking sector, a cohort of culturally working class ‘barrow boys’—defined as ‘streetwise dealers from East and South London’—dominated the trading floor, where conspicuous consumption and homophobic jokes signified status and belonging at work (Zaloom 2006: 77). This changed dramatically when managers diversified their staff and began to recruit graduates—especially women and ethnic minorities—whose diverse, individual approaches, it was felt, could be harnessed for greater economic success. Managers viewed this as a process of ‘professionalisation’, suggesting that meanings of professionalism are derived at least partly from performances of class and social status.

The idea of professionalism as a performance is captured by economic anthropologist David Graeber’s provocative claim that large numbers of professional, middle-management and administrative roles are ‘bullshit jobs’; that is, jobs lacking any meaningful contribution to society and existing ‘just for the sake of keeping us all working’ (Graeber 2018). These jobs include those located in industries such as financial services, telemarketing, corporate law, public sector administration, human resources, and public relations—as well as the various roles that exist to support these industries. There is a performative quality to the jobs since, Graeber suggests, those who occupy them would readily admit that their roles lack meaningful social purpose. However, this point of view may overlook the ways that such roles, even if failing to contribute to loftier projects of the public good, may meaningfully signify personal, aspirational goals, especially in places where upward mobility is by no means assured. This brings us to the next theme of professionalism: as a route to upward mobility.

Status, aspiration and class mobility

As well as focusing on cultures of work itself, anthropologists studying professionals have also shed light on class mobility and aspiration. They followed professionals not only in their official roles at work but also in their lives beyond the workplace, as family and community members and as citizens. They have sought to understand the role of professional identity within wider life projects shaped by lifestyle aspirations and class trajectories. Witnessing the burgeoning bureaucracies and professional networks emerging in Germany at the turn of the twentieth century, Weber recognised the importance of education and occupation as features of one’s ‘life chances’. New cultures of professionalism and white-collar employment were coming into being in ways that oriented scholars towards a focus on a growing yet differentiated middle class.

In India, professional employment in the government sector was formerly viewed as the hallmark of what it meant to be middle-class. Yet new cultures of consumerism have made middle-class lifestyles more widely accessible (Donner & De Neve 2011). Anthropologists turned their attention from workplace identity to cultures of consumption in trying to understand this so-called ‘new’ middle class. This shift partly reflected that labour casualisation and the decline of secure employment made it harder and harder for people to build their identities around their workplace. Instead, consumerist ideologies emerged that offered alternative forms of inclusion as well as opening up new lines of exclusion (Comaroff & Comaroff 2000). These insecurities also meant that middle-class lifestyles were increasingly precarious and were often funded by risky borrowing (James 2015). From these studies, it emerges that a focus on consumption practices is insufficient for understanding middle-class experiences. Instead, it may be necessary to look at the intersections between values created at work and the ways that status and aspiration are formed beyond it.

While consumption is a marker of class status, forms of belonging created by professional identities equally persist. In India, a rapidly expanding information technology (IT) industry has created demand for highly skilled jobs. This is accompanied by a growing disdain among young, educated people towards public-sector employment, which they associate with low salaries and the draconian hierarchies of an earlier era (Fuller & Narasimhan 2007: 142). Reflecting on what this shift means for people’s identification with ideas of Indian nationhood, C.J. Fuller & Haripriya Narasimhan draw on research with IT professionals in Chennai to repudiate assumptions that globalisation leads people to abandon a commitment to the Indian nation. While many of these young professionals seek to gain ‘exposure’ by working overseas, they aspire to settle and build their lives back in India, assured of a highly paid job in the sector. This optimism orientates people towards new ideas of nationhood that depart from earlier ideas associated with Nehruvian nationalism (cf. Saxenian 2016).

Elsewhere in India, professional work is less secure. In a remote, rural region of Uttarakhand, government programmes are increasingly delivered through the quasi-independent institutions of government-funded NGOs (Bear & Mathur 2015). These organisations are populated by ‘young professionals’, a term borrowed from international development jargon. They are university-trained engineers and computer programmers holding short-term contracts. While their salaries were on a par with those who held permanent state employment, their temporary status and lack of housing or health insurance made their positions more insecure than their government-employed counterparts. Nonetheless, many were relieved to have found employment at all, and hoped that it would pave the way to a job in the city, a gateway to the middle-class milieu they wished to participate in. They did not hold ‘government jobs’ and actively dissociated themselves from what they saw as an anachronistic workplace order of draconian hierarchies and deferent submission embraced by their permanently-employed colleagues. This represented a distancing from the state because of their insecure contractual positions and because of the appeal of the growing private-sector industries of the kind described by Fuller and Narasimhan. In Ghana, too, professional qualifications do not necessarily lead to economic fulfilment or middle-class status. Yet professionals in Accra’s media and knowledge economy nonetheless view themselves as bearers of ‘respectable nationhood’ (Kauppinen 2017: 270).

The meanings of professionalism are influenced by wider social and political shifts. In China, new values of professional autonomy came about as market-based practices of labour allocation began to emerge in the 1990s (Hoffman 2010). Formerly, the government allocated jobs to graduates according to a system known as ‘iron rice bowl’, leaving them with no choice about which job they would do or where they would live. In a new market-based system, emphasis is placed on individual choice, which is nurtured through events such as graduate job fairs. Yet the government continues to influence this process, through managing and funding some of the recruitment events and through an on-going ‘moral education’ of university students and graduates. New market practices encouraging choice and personal responsibility combine with earlier socialist ideas about service to the nation to produce a ‘patriotic professionalism’ among these young adults (Hoffman 2010). Despite the choices that people now have, the previous security provided by the state as part of the ‘iron rice bowl’ has given way to a more precarious set of circumstances with less secure pensions and poor access to health care (Hoffman 2010; Hsu et al. 2007: 3). Since the collapse of Chinese socialism amounted to a process of de-institutionalisation, understanding its aftermath requires studying the ways that institutions are being constructed (Hsu et al. 2007: 3). Hence, professional practice becomes an important site for understanding contemporary China.

Anthropologists have reflected on a number of other ways that people articulate ideas of belonging through their professional identities. For young urbanites in Nairobi, Rachel Spronk shows, professionalism offers a source of identity that allows them to bypass ethnic differences which they have come to view as divisive (Spronk 2012). Similar observations are made about civil servants in Ghana (Lentz 2014) and nurses in South Africa (Hull 2017).

Migration offers many professionals a route to new forms of prestige. But as professional expectations are formed in one context, working overseas can produce a jarring reassessment of one’s own credentials. Czech nurses felt their self-worth as professionals undermined when they discovered themselves ill-equipped to perform the strict workplace protocols they encountered in hospitals in the UK and Saudi Arabia (Bludau 2014). When they returned to the Czech Republic, some were frustrated by the absence of such protocols and were motivated to initiate change as a way to sustain the professional identity they had come to associate with overseas practices. Consequently, we can understand professionalism to be ‘rooted in one’s personal history and built on through professional and personal experiences’ (Bludau 2014: 877, italics in original). Migration offers a particularly useful lens for exploring this issue.

Professional status can also offer an alternative workplace ethic to ‘clientelism’. Among civil servants in Ghana, for example, professionalism is associated with the ‘state’ and with a universalist ethos of service to the nation. In contrast, patronage is associated with ‘government’, and was practiced ‘unofficially’ and less readily spoken about (Lentz 2014). Here, professionalism offers a language of political neutrality that is part of workplace ethos. Thus, we may need to investigate further how patrimonial practices frequently associated with post-colonial government dovetail with workplace configurations. Notions of professionalism promise to be important pieces of this puzzle.

Professional ethics and care

Viewing professionalism as a site of governmentality, a performance, or a route to prestige risks overlooking ethical projects at work. Recent anthropological debates have highlighted that bureaucracies do not only reproduce indifference, governmentality, or structural violence but are also sites in which ideas about the ‘public good’ come to be debated, contested, and developed (Bear & Mathur 2015). Bureaucracies are ‘an expression of a social contract between citizens and officials that aim to generate a utopian order’ (Bear & Mathur 2015: 18). A focus on professional values and practices offers a mode for investigating the ways that such ethical practices come into being.

As my own study of nurses in a rural government hospital in South Africa shows, a professional ethic can be located in a long history of mission medicine as well as in more recent forms of public sector management and post-apartheid ideas of citizenship (Hull 2017). Work and citizenship are in South Africa indelibly linked in the post-liberation period. If apartheid was to be understood partly as a system of racialised exclusion from the workplace, especially from professional work, then to be fully a citizen was to become synonymous with salaried employment as an entitlement and a signifier of national identity. Yet far from being an automatic entitlement, the identity of ‘professional’ can be precarious, especially for an occupation that has struggled historically to legitimise its status vis-à-vis the male-dominated world of medicine. Nurses struggle with the dilemma of how to care in a situation where ideas of public accountability are reduced to narrow techniques such as audit. In this setting, nurses build their identities as professionals in relation to memories of mission medicine, contemporary religious practice, and ideas of ‘calling’, as they negotiate and reimagine their role as carers. Professional identities have as much to do with the ‘relational, affective, and ritualistic’ dimensions of work, and the meanings of care that they produce, as with the disciplining practices more frequently associated with management professionals (Brown 2016: 592). Approaching public administration through the lens of ideologies and ethics of professionalism focuses attention on the ethics of care that are entailed.

In many of these studies, well-documented themes in the sociological literature reappear, such as the tension between collective values and individual reputation. For foreign news correspondents, professional legitimacy is less about official accreditation and more to do with in-house socialisation in which one absorbs organisational culture and builds one’s individual reputation through ‘face-to-face acquaintance’ (Hannerz 2004: 81). In a social-media dominated world increasingly oriented towards a work ethos of ‘self-as-business’, the imperative to engage in personal branding characterises many white collar fields (Gershon 2017). Such tensions have long featured as part of the search for professional identity, rather than being singularly located in the turn to neo-liberalism. Nonetheless their intensification during a period of privatisation and outsourcing raises interesting questions about the shifting parameters of professional legitimacy, autonomy, and ethics. So too do tendencies towards de-professionalisation, as more sophisticated technologies reduce the human skills required in certain fields. Challenges to professionalism have also been launched by professionals themselves: for instance, as development workers attempt to locate expertise in the realm of ‘local knowledge’; or new forms of participative, citizen engagement work to subvert the hierarchies that produce taken-for-granted expertise (Mosse 2019).

The study of professionals may lead anthropologists to turn a critical eye on themselves. It can be difficult if not impossible to carry out ethnographic research among professionals, since anthropologists often discover that their interlocutors refuse to be objectified according to the knowledge regimes of a different field of expertise (Boyer 2008: 39-40). Anthropologists might be most effective through a collaborative approach with their interlocutors and by becoming attuned to the scepticism and reflexivity that professionals harbour about their own practice. Attempts to achieve these aims in practice often encounter obstacles. Reflecting on his experiences of researching an international development intervention in India, David Mosse described the objections that professionals raised to his claims about the successes and failures of the project. They made official complaints, fearing their professional reputations were being compromised by his research findings (Mosse 2011b: 21). For Mosse, this tension had to do with the need for professionals to deny or suppress complexity as a core feature of sustaining professional identity and legitimacy. In their complaints, the concept of professionalism was drawn upon explicitly as a basis for denying that such informal practices existed. Mosse argues that professionals were ‘professionally committed to their denial’ (2011b: 21). This problem returns us to a central epistemological challenge for the anthropological study of professionalism, as outlined by Dominic Boyer: ‘How can I [the anthropologist] document another expert culture without precisely re-framing their expert knowledge in the analytical categories of my own, thus absorbing them into my jurisdiction?’ (Boyer 2008: 41). In order to reach a collaborative approach, anthropologists may have to recognise the contingencies of their ways of knowing and accept a kind of epistemic parity with the theoretical and technical frameworks of other professional fields.

Conclusion

A profession is generally understood as a standardised body of knowledge and practice situated within organisational or institutional contexts. Its authority is widely recognised, popularly mandated, and relies on state-sanctioned systems of training and accreditation. Yet as we scratch below the surface of formal definitions, it is evident that rather than denoting a fixed meaning, the category of ‘professional’ is produced and reproduced through messy organisational practices and socially embedded systems of knowledge production and power dynamics. Rather than being a label conferred automatically on the basis of formal accreditation, the term ‘professional’ is always in the making. Moreover, the work entailed in producing an appearance of coherent, successful professionalism can often sit apart from the ‘real’ work of professionals from day to day. Professionalism may best be understood, therefore, as ‘process rather than product’ (Mosse 2011a: 3). Running through the study of professionals is a core tension: are professionals seeking private advancement, perhaps even at the expense of those who rely on them, or are they committed to collective, ethical endeavours? The question is partly the legacy of early sociological understandings of society as a moral project existing in tension with private pursuits. It becomes more nuanced as we turn attention to the lived experiences of professionals, who strive to build satisfying working lives while navigating expectations of all sorts in their families, communities, and workplaces.

References

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Boyer, D. 2008. Thinking through the anthropology of experts. Anthropology in Action 15, 38-46.

Brown, H. 2016. Managerial relations in Kenyan health care: empathy and the limits of governmentality. Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute 22, 591-609.

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––––––– 2000. Millennial capitalism: first thoughts on a second coming. Public Culture 12, 291-343.

Dingwall, R. 2008. Essays on professions. Aldershot: Ashgate.

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Freeman, C. 1993. Designing women: corporate discipline and Barbados’s off-shore pink-collar sector. Cultural Anthropology 8, 169-86.

Fuller, C.J. & H. Narasimhan 2007. Information technology professionals and the new-rich middle class in Chennai (Madras). Modern Asian Studies 41, 121-50.

Gershon, I. 2017. Down and out in the new economy: how people find (or don’t find) work today. Chicago: University Press.

Graeber, D. 2018. Bullshit jobs: a theory. London: Penguin.

Green, M. 2011. Calculating compassion: accounting for some categorical practices in international development. In Adventures in aidland: the anthropology of professionals in international development (ed.) D. Mosse, 33-56. New York: Berghahn Books.

Hannerz, U. 2004. Foreign news: exploring the world of foreign correspondents. Chicago: University Press.

Hoffman, L.M. 2010. Patriotic professionalism in urban China: fostering talent. Philadelphia: Temple University Press.

Hsu, C.L., J. Adams & G. Steinmetz 2007. Creating market socialism: how ordinary people are shaping class and status in China. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press.

Hughes, E.C. 2009. The sociological eye: selected papers. New Brunswick, N.J.: Transaction Publishers.

Hull, E. 2012. Paperwork and the contradictions of accountability in a South African hospital. Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute 18, 613-32.

––––––– 2017. Contingent citizens: professional aspiration in a South African hospital. London: Bloomsbury Academic.

Hunt, N. R. 1999. A colonial lexicon of birth ritual, medicalization, and mobility in the Congo. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.

James, D. 2015. Money from nothing: indebtedness and aspiration in South Africa. Palo Alto: Stanford University Press.

Kauppinen, A.-R. 2017. Accra’s professionals: an ethnography of work and value in a West African business hub. PhD dissertation, London School of Economics and Political Science, United Kingdom (available on-line: http://etheses.lse.ac.uk/3706/). Accessed 19 December 2018.

Lentz, C. 2014. ‘I take an oath to the state, not the government’: career trajectories and professional ethics of Ghanaian public servants. In States at work: dynamics of African bureaucracies (eds) T. Bierschenk & J.-P. Olivier de Sardan, 175-204. Leiden: Brill.

Moore, H.L. & M. Vaughan 1994. Cutting down trees: gender, nutrition, and agricultural change in the Northern Province of Zambia, 1890-1990. London: James Currey.

Mosse, D. 2011a. Introduction: the anthropology of expertise and professionals in international development. In Adventures in aidland: the anthropology of professionals in international development (ed.) D. Mosse, 1-31. New York: Berghahn Books.

––––––– 2011b. Adventures in aidland: the anthropology of professionals in international development. New York: Berghahn Books.

––––––– 2019. Can the experience of participatory development help think critically about ‘patient and public involvement’ in UK healthcare? Sociological Research Online 24, 444-61.

Richards, A.I. 1995. Land, labour and diet in Northern Rhodesia: an economic study of the Bemba tribe. Münster: LIT Verlag.

Riles, A. 2006. Documents: artifacts of modern knowledge. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press.

Saxenian, A. 2002. Silicon Valley’s new immigrant high-growth entrepreneurs. Economic Development Quarterly 16, 20-31.

Spronk, R. 2012. Ambiguous pleasures: sexuality and middle class self-perceptions in Nairobi. New York: Berghahn Books.

White, P., A. Hillman & J. Latimer 2012. Ordering, enrolling, and dismissing: moments of access across hospital spaces. Space and Culture 15, 68-87.

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Note on contributor

Elizabeth Hull is a senior lecturer in anthropology at SOAS University of London. She is author of Contingent citizens: professional aspiration in a South African hospital (Bloomsbury 2017).

Dr Elizabeth Hull, Department of Anthropology and Sociology, SOAS University of London, WC1H 0XG, London, United Kingdom. e.hull@soas.ac.uk

[1] A detailed discussion of the sociology of professionalism is provided by Robert Dingwall (2008).

Farming

Felix Stein — Thu, 23 Jan 2020 11:23:31 +0000

Andrew Ofstehage

Cornell University

Initially published 23 Jan 2020

http://doi.org/10.29164/20farming

Abstract:

Farming has become increasingly visible in recent years, following a growing public interest in how food is produced. Anthropologists have been studying farming since the founding of the discipline. This entry summarises the origins of farming and agricultural intensification before analysing three themes of the social anthropology of farming. First, farming is dependent on relations of power and capital. Second, farming is deeply engaged with social relations of value, race, and gender. Third, farming has a deep engagement with the physical environment in ways that are generative and relational. New themes in the anthropology of farming include a focus on farm workers and the question of how farming fits into three theories of epochal planetary change in which the dominant influences on the environment and climate are human activity, capital, and plantation agriculture.

Introduction

Food and agriculture are a central and sustaining element of human life both physiologically and socially. Agriculture has also had a major environmental impact. It has transformed much of the U.S. Great Plains and Brazilian Cerrado into fields of grain, and is at least partially to blame for wildfires that threaten the Amazon rainforest and West Papuan forests. It follows that farming has maintained a place of focus within socio-cultural anthropology and archaeology. The root of the term ‘farmer’ is ‘one who collects taxes’ and other duties, and ‘farm’ originally referred to a total rent payment (Donald 1867), but farming is broadly defined as the process of doing agriculture and animal husbandry. It includes the cultivation of plants and the raising of livestock for food, feed, fibre, and sometimes fuel. Academics make sense of farming in different ways. Agronomists often study conservation and how to maximise food production. Economists frequently ask themselves how farmers respond to markets, incentives, and costs. Rural sociologists and anthropologists tend to focus on the meanings and relationships of farming. Historically, anthropologists have focused on non-Western, pre-industrial societies, and sociologists on Western, industrial settings, though scholars from both disciplines have blurred these lines. Anthropologists continue to centre on meaning and relationships, but also ask holistically how markets and capital, the physical environment, and social meaning all come together.

Agricultural cultivation is a co-dependent process that involves humans, plants, soils, and animals. It drives and complements systems of exchange, whether through market exchange at farmers markets, large-scale commodity sales and barter, or reciprocal gift exchange between neighbours and within communities. It depends on social relationships with business partners, kin, farm workers, and neighbours. Even seemingly anonymous global soy markets, involving large-scale farmers and multinational agribusinesses, often depend on the trust-based exchange of commodities for agricultural inputs (Wesz Jr. 2014). Farming also modifies plants and animals through domestication and transforms landscapes and soils. It is done both at the scale of local ecologies and communities and at the scale of national agricultural policies and global markets. For reasons of simplicity, this entry divides this multiplicity of the anthropology of farming into three categories of study – the politics and economics of farming (including questions around power, work, and capital), its meaning and social values, and the socio-biological and socio-environmental aspects of farming and food.

Anthropology has always engaged with agrarian people. Proponents of agricultural anthropology, i.e. the comparative, holistic, and cross-temporal study of human interactions with technology, ecologies, and society through agriculture, write that ‘[v]irtually every manifestation of agriculture ranging from shifting cultivation to modern industrial farming has been subject to anthropological study’ (Rhoades & Rhoades 1980: 10). Anthropologists tend not to study agriculture in isolation. Even the most technologically-advanced and capital-intensive farming systems are situated in environments of soil, water, and light as well as in social relationships. Thus, anthropologists tend to build on a holistic view of farming, which allows them to understand farmers and farm communities in a way that highlights their relations with plants and soil, markets and reciprocal exchange networks, and society and state.

Today, fewer and fewer people are directly involved in agriculture. In the United States, economic output from agriculture as a sector leads only educational services and arts, entertainment, and recreation.^[1]lThe global economic transition from farm work to industrial wage labour is driven by the global integration of markets and migration networks (Nash 1994) as well as rising agricultural productivity and mechanization that increase labour productivity and reduce labour demand for farming (Janssen 2018). Yet we still see references to farming everywhere we look today. Talk show hosts and journalists tell us which ‘superfoods’ to eat and which kinds of food are exacerbating hunger in peasant communities (McDonell 2015); trips to the grocery store may include biographies and portraits of the farmers who grew the kumquats on display; popular television programs embed critiques of capitalist and industrial agriculture in their plots (Specht 2013); and we are invited to ‘vote with our money’ to transform broken food systems (Pollan 2006). As the author and activist Michael Pollan brought to the attention of many Western consumers, the foods we eat are increasingly abstracted from place, people, and even plants. A disconnect between consumers and farmers and a growing interest in how food is grown may thus go hand in hand. This distance has brought distrust, and thus consumers want to know if animals were mistreated, crops were genetically modified, or if their shopping list will threaten Indigenous communities or distant rainforests. This growing awareness and concern for food and farming have drawn renewed interest in the anthropological study of food and agriculture. Fortunately, the origins, expansion, and impacts of agriculture have been hotly debated by anthropologists since the founding of the discipline.

Origins of agriculture

With the first agricultural revolution around 12,000 years ago, humans began cultivating and raising their food. This period was also associated with sedentary lifestyles, an increasingly complex division of labour, and the development of art. Early studies of the origins and expansion of agriculture focused on the factors that led humans to shift livelihood strategies, in particular from a nomadic to more sedentary life. These studies focused on environmental factors, population pressure, and co-dependent plant, animal, and human interactions. Marginal Zone theory, for example, proposes that humans turned to agriculture when optimal zones for hunting and gathering could no longer support growing human populations (Binford 1968). Groups of people may have migrated to less abundant zones, where hunting and gathering were insufficient for their survival, and adopted agricultural production. Early animal husbandry may have begun when communities enclosed and fed animals that foraged in gardens (Linares 1976). Marginal Zone theory also suggests a mutual process of domestication that rendered humans and animals interdependent. Evolutionary models of agriculture similarly describe the co-dependency and co-evolution of people and plants as a relationship in which people gain a source of food and plants (Rindos 1984). Critics of Marginal Zone theory claim that it is environmentally deterministic and does not account for cultural and social factors such as power, leadership, or social institutions (Bender 1978; Hayden 1990). A ‘feasting model’ of domestication credits technological advancement (i.e. new fishing technologies, mass seed-collecting techniques, and practices of food processing and storage) for the origins of agriculture. These techniques may have enabled individuals to create a food surplus and then distribute the food strategically through feasts to gain prestige and power (Hayden 1990).

Anthropologists also ask how agriculture became intensive. Intensive agriculture tends to involve shorter fallow periods between crops, an increased use of labour (by humans or machines), and a more intensive use of other inputs such as seeds, fertilisers, or irrigation (Netting 1993). Some writers relate the intensification of agricultural production and animal domestication to a social evolutionary frame of human history. They may, for example, argue that the intensification of human-managed ecologies is a sign of cultural and technological progress (Childe & Daniel 1951). However, a more common approach in anthropology today is to ask how and why agriculture became intensive, without necessarily relating this to normative notions of societal progress. Agricultural communities may, for example, adapt intensive agricultural production strategies to feed growing populations, avoid famines, or respond to ecological constrains (Bruno 2014). Moreover, markets and state coercion have often induced farmers to intensify production, obliging them to shift towards cash crop production to improve household wellbeing (Finnis 2008) or to meet coercive state tribute or tax demands (Godoy 1984). Farmers’ capacity to increase production yields means that anthropologists have been sceptical of Malthusian theories postulating that overpopulation leads to famine (Boserup 1965).

Later work showed that agricultural intensification also depended on certain agro-ecological conditions (Stone & Downum 1999). For example, a region with low or highly variable precipitation or infertile soils may not merit intensification or agricultural production at all. Communities do not necessarily respond to food shortages by intensifying production when the local ecology cannot support intensive agriculture. Instead, they may respond through political action, such as limiting land access to specific ethnic or kin groups (Stone & Downum 1999). Neither is intensification of farming directly correlated with yield increases. In the late 1970s, Clifford Geertz developed the term ‘agricultural involution’ to describe the growing social complexity and intensification of human agricultural labour that comes under outside pressure. The term places social change at the intersection of agricultural change and political and economic environments (Geertz 1970). Geertz showed that, along with population growth, it was three centuries of Dutch colonialism (from the seventeenth century) and the introduction of new crops and technologies (i.e. transplanting, land preparation, and double cropping) which increased overall agricultural production in Indonesia. Yet, production continued to be labour-intensive and labour productivity remained stagnant. The notion of agricultural involution considers population density, colonialism, and technology together. Thereby it holistically describes the social and physical causes of agricultural intensification.

Regardless of the relative merits and pitfalls of intensification, farming communities may decline to pursue agricultural intensification. Swidden farmers in Indonesia, for example, carefully balance land, labour, and time as they apply their ‘unique knowledge of their environment and how to exploit it’ (Dove 1985: 384). Similarly, British colonial farming practices were not rejected by West African farmers out of ignorance, but out of a preference for their own agronomically-derived and tested practices (Richards 1985). Risk management, market incentives or lack thereof, and political and social structures all co-determine if families will pursue agricultural intensification (Stone 2001). State and colonial governments, for example, have pushed intensification through both the violent enforcement of colonial demands and semi-voluntary enrolment in green revolution agriculture, which began worldwide in the 1960s and consolidated in the 1970s (Franke 1974).

Relatedly, agriculture may seem to sit at the end of an evolution from hunting and gathering to pastoralism to farming, but people may choose to avoid agriculture and sedentism in favour of mobility and flexibility. Hunting and gathering communities can enjoy greater amounts of leisure time than farming communities (Sahlins 1972). Marshall Sahlins’ theory of the ‘original affluent society’ proposes that hunter-gatherers can satisfy their everyday needs without agriculture. They may eschew the benefits of intensive farming in favour of the lower labour demands that come with hunting and gathering. While the caloric output per person tends to be greater in farming communities, this involves trade-offs. Agricultural production requires more work, necessitates sedentary lifestyles, and often reduces nutritional diversity. Life without agriculture can demand less work per person and it can provide access to a diverse and nutritious diet (Lee 2017). Alternatives to sedentary agriculture also provide political benefits. Populations of farmers in the Highlands of Southeast Asia pursue mobile forms of farming to avoid state control (Scott 2010). The members of these mobile communities plant crops that require little care and can be left in the ground for long periods of time. They cultivate land that is difficult to access, but easy to find cover in. Using this style of ‘escape agriculture’, farmers may adapt their crops, labour, and fields to escape the state surveillance and control that settled, sedentary agricultural farming communities cannot avoid.

Agriculture is closely linked to the development of states and societies. In the Southern Moche State in the arid Moche Valley of Peru, agriculture depended heavily on irrigation systems – the control of which afforded a centralised, expansive state (Billman 2002). Extensification (or, the expansion of farmland area under cultivation) and intensification of agriculture in the Alps of Europe in 1000 AD required clearing forest to extend arable land and reducing the fallow period to intensify production. Both processes were directed by land-controlling elites who used the profits of increased production to consolidate their control of territory and people (Wolf 2010). Sociologists have similarly argued that agriculture reflects and guides the power of state systems in the present day (Friedman & McMichael 1989). Agriculture can increase the amount of calories produced per person and make sedentary life more viable, yet it also enables the control of society by states (Scott 2017).

The origins of agriculture, causes of intensification, and the relation between the rise of agriculture and the rise of states and societies are important milestones in human history. They tell us how we as a human race became who we are today. The way anthropologists debate and find evidence for these milestones also says a lot about the discipline as a whole. Anthropologists trace the comparative origins of agriculture to human processes of population growth and migration in industrial and agrarian societies, but also to non-human processes in which plants and animals developed co-dependence with humans. Agricultural intensification is a response to population pressure but also to political pressure, and it always remains dependent on political developments as well as considerations of risk, value, and agro-ecologies. The following sections discuss three ways in which anthropologists engage with agriculture today: political economy, meaning-making in agriculture, and engagements with natural environments.

Political economy: power and capital

A key anthropological contribution to the study of farming is placing that activity within relations of power and capital. We see the importance of power in the origins and implications of agricultural intensification as well as in the everyday realities of farming today. Debates on the nature of agrarian change under capitalism, or the ‘agrarian question’, begin with Marx’s Capital (Marx & Engels 1967) and continue through the development of Marxist thought (see Kautsky 1988; Lenin 1964; Chayanov 1966). The agrarian question asks what happens to peasants and farmers in a capitalist economy. Karl Marx proposed two pathways for the peasantry: that they will eventually become wage labourers, or that they will become a collective political unit (Akram-Lodhi & Kay 2010a). The first pathway is largely a transition from peasantry into wage labour with a few landowners rising to a new ‘rural middle class’ and ‘completing the transition to a fully capitalist mode of production’ (Akram-Lodhi & Kay 2010a). The second pathway would be a gradual coalescence of peasants into a collective political unit of agricultural production on a national scale (Akram-Lodhi & Kay 2010a). Today the agrarian question tackles similar questions of how peasants and small farmers engage with and resist capital, but with greater attention to how these struggles intersect with other criteria such as gender and ecology (Akram-Lodhi & Kay 2010b).

Power and capital operate on different scales, from local communities to global commodity flows. Farming communities, for example, are shaped by the scale and type of agriculture practiced nearby. Large-scale, industrial farming has at times been associated with less vibrant forms of community life, centralised economic activity, and greater dependency on large capital providers and the political power of the state. Communities associated with small-scale, less capital-intensive farming tend to attract more diverse small businesses and may develop a richer community life (Goldschmidt 1978). That said, farming communities can also reinforce capitalist values of farming. During the 1980s US farm crisis, in which falling commodity prices and farm debt led to widespread farm foreclosures, neighbours blamed each other for falling into debt and losing their farms (Dudley 2002). Elsewhere during the same crisis, farmers often eschewed ‘traditional’ values of farming, such as land stewardship, deeply-held religious beliefs, and family-centred decision making, in favour of individualism and profitmaking (Barlett 1993). At a global scale, sugar creates relations of power and capital, linking Caribbean sugar plantations and the rise of industrial work in Europe. The early use of slave labour on sugar plantations and later exploitation of Caribbean farmworkers created cheap sugar, which in turn sustained a growing industrial working class in Great Britain (Mintz 1985). Importantly, while this entry focuses on farming, Sidney Mintz’ work shows the importance of considering food consumption and farming together.

We also see the impact and power of capital in terms of the essential means of agricultural production: seeds, labour, soil, and other inputs. Plant breeding in the Americas has culminated in a mostly undemocratic seed economy. Traditions of local plant breeding, seed saving, and seed exchange have here become dominated by state-supported breeding centres which focused on productivity and market demands. The seed economy has subsequently become governed by multinational seed companies that restrict seed saving or exchange, selling seeds as technological packages along with pesticides and other agro-chemicals (Kloppenburg 2005). Multi-national agribusinesses have often privatised seeds and plant genetics, restricting not only access to seeds but also the ability for farmers to replant them. Further, technological innovations such as genetically engineered seeds and pesticides tend to create treadmills of dependency in which farmers become increasingly reliant on agribusinesses for inputs and expertise (Stone & Flachs 2018). Alternatively, rural communities have reversed this trend by creating seed saver networks to develop, preserve, and share seeds that are suitable to local agro-ecoystems and diets. These networks often support garden landscapes over monocultures, reciprocal exchange over market exchange, and low-input agriculture over high-input agriculture (Nazarea 2005).

While the corporate control of seeds shows the imposition of corporate power, anthropologists also consider how such power is resisted by activists and farmers (Fitting 2010). Participatory, democratic seed exchanges may have the potential to slow and even reverse the active dispossession of farmers and create new forms of ‘seed sovereignty’ (Kloppenburg 2010). At the same time, participatory plant breeding programs may harbour the potential to not only create access to seeds, but to also breed seeds specifically suited for farmers’ agro-ecologies (Almekinders, Thiele & Danial 2007). Seed saving among Tharaka farmers in Kenya, for example, contributes to crop diversity, but depends on strong social organisation for seed exchange (Laberyrie et al. 2014).

Agrochemicals such as soil fertilisers or products that kill plant weeds (herbicides), insect pests (insecticides), and fungal diseases (fungicides), have become a seemingly unavoidable part of the farming landscape. Yet the impacts of their production and use are longstanding and far-reaching, as shown by the pesticide plant disaster in Bhopal, India in 1984. The plant’s explosion, which resulted from lax safety design, poisoned the air of Bhopal and killed thousands, while leaving long-term health risks for the survivors (Fortun 2001).

Alternative markets (e.g. fair trade, organic, and bird-friendly farming) break the binary distinction between corporate vs. non-corporate agriculture. Here, commercial production practices may replace pesticides and synthetic fertilisers with integrated pest management and soil conservation practices. Anthropologists have filled a critical role in understanding these markets by asking who benefits from them, what effect they have on environmental health and economic sustainability, and whether these markets tame or deepen market forces. Farmers markets in the United States have expanded as farmers seek out reliable local markets and consumers hope to support local farming and know where their food comes from. However, like conventional markets, direct trade often involves a host of middlemen, such as processers and inspectors, and coalitions of busy farmers and distracted consumers face a difficult task in challenging conventional food systems (Janssen 2017). Some anthropologists warn that if alternative markets do not create new political possibilities, then they may only be another way of commodifying social and environmental life (Guthman 2007). The ethnographic study of fair trade thus challenges the potential of labelling initiatives for empowering farmers. Labelling tends to come with strict standards for farmers and little oversight for food companies who sell fair trade goods (Lyon & Moberg 2010). Origin labels for such goods as tequila and mezcal (Bowen 2015) or Darjeeling tea (Besky 2013) distinguish products from generic commodities, but fail to address many of the underlying historical and sociopolitical structures that affect farmers and farmworkers. Lastly, organic farming can today be part of industrialised farming, with only some minor differences from conventional agriculture (Guthman 2004). Ethnographic studies thus demonstrate the challenges of disrupting commodified flows of capital. Thinking holistically about how alternative markets work in the context of government policies, historical trajectories, and on-the-ground farming practices lends nuance and depth to how we understand them.

In recent years, land has come into focus for academics, as the threat of a global ‘land grab’ grows (Borras et al. 2012; White et al. 2012). The term ‘land grab’ refers to the large-scale purchase of land, often by foreign corporations, in countries of the Global South. This is a concern for land accessibility as well as national sovereignty. The land grab often dispossesses farming communities of land, sometimes through violent means, and it frequently leads to deforestation, as tracts of forest are converted to agricultural land. Anthropologists may themselves be financially entangled in these processes. For example, TIAA, a pension fund that manages retirement accounts for most U.S.-affiliated anthropologists, has become a major landowner in Brazil, whilst being denounced for environmental destruction and human rights violations (Farthing 2017).^[2]Even here, resistance is possible. Groups such as the Brazilian Landless Workers Movement foment both civil society political action and direct land transfers to support local farming and resist land dispossession (Wolford 2010).

Finally, farming knowledge has come into focus as a form of power as well. Agricultural extension agents have long used money and political influence as tools of imposing industrialised and modern farming practices (Arce & Long 1992). They continue to frame scientific Western agricultural knowledge as expertise and Indigenous knowledge as a form of ignorance (Mitchell 2002). State agencies for agricultural research and extension, and private corporations’ research and development departments, invest in knowledge production and dissemination and tend to focus on cash crops and exportable goods. Anthropologists often work to de-centre this knowledge by studying alternative ways of doing and knowing agriculture. They frequently advocate for the incorporation of and respect for Indigenous knowledge in rural development (Sillitoe 2006) and on many occasions they work to recognise non-industrial farming practices and knowledge as legitimate (e.g. González 2001).

Culture: meaning and identity

Farming is always imbued with cultural and social connections, a fact that is increasingly recognised in the study of food production. Agronomists can explain how much nitrogen is necessary to grow a high yield of corn, but anthropologists show that, for example, farmers may use ideas of hot and cold to inform their use of manure (González 2001). Economists can show that cultivating crops without using any kind of tillage saves farmers time and money, but anthropologists may find that, for farmers, tillage practices demonstrate their hard work, skill, and masculinity. In agriculture, as in other industries, meaning and collective identities are connected to work and practice (Holland et al. 2001). Gender, race, and class also structure how farmers perform agriculture and how they access land, credit, and agricultural knowledge. Anthropologists thus often foreground the importance of meaning-making, identity, and the value of agriculture to people.

For example, notions of what constitutes ‘good farming’ connect farm work to a farmer’s reputation and standing in a community. Being considered a good farmer can be used to control in-group colleagues and also assert authority and legitimacy against other groups. Industrial farmers attribute social value to industrial practices and landscapes – claiming a certain rationality and cultural value as well as a concrete benefit of ‘feeding the world’ (Burton 2004). White farmers in Zimbabwe may claim to be good farmers to legitimise their calls for land access. They argue that their stewardship of the land and farming skills (expressed in technical know-how and yield maximization) give them more legitimate claims to the land and to the identity of being farmers than Indigenous or Black farmers may have (Suzuki 2018). Holdeman Mennonites in Brazil also connect moral frames of being good farmers, good family members, and good community members by limiting land holdings within their communities to better distribute land and by limiting the use of GPS-guided precision farming technology and large machinery (Ofstehage 2019).

Racism, sexism, and nationalism also affect farming life. They may exclude people from farming by limiting land access, access to credit, and land extension. For example, Black farmers in the United States still fight for land and basic inclusion (Grim 1995) while Black farmers’ cooperatives and unions have in the past struggled for the rights of southern tenant farmers and supported alternative agricultural visions and practices (White 2017). Black farmers thereby not only fight for the right to farm: they also work for recognition of their farming expertise and experience, paralleling and contributing to the struggle for civil rights (McCutcheon 2019). American Indian farmers equally fight for the right to farm on their own terms while often facing condescension and pressure to adopt white farmer attitudes and practices (Biolsi 2018). In Latin America, farmer-to-farmer exchanges support and enrich alternative ways of farming, resisting dominant trends of modernising agriculture and supporting collective identities of campesino (peasant) agriculture (Holt-Giménez 2006).

Gender, masculinity, and femininity equally structure farming and are structured by it. Farming masculinities may be moulded to fit concepts of modern agriculture. For example, in the United States farm labour has become increasingly centred on men as family farms have transformed from dispersed family labour and decision-making to production dominated by single individuals (Barlett 1993). Peggy Barlett argues that as agriculture has become more of a business-centred activity focused on profit, men in heterosexual farm families have excluded women from both farm work and decision-making. More recently, the image of farming masculinity has shifted away from productivist markers like straight crop rows, weed-free fields, and high yields, to financial markers such as profitability, total acreage, and media presence (Bell et al. 2015; Ofstehage 2018a). Farmers who do not conform to this vision of agriculture can be subject to ridicule or dismissed as hobby farmers. Women farmers are particularly under pressure to demonstrate their business savvy, leading them to understate concerns for the environment, community, and family (Ofstehage 2018a). An alternative to agrarian and industrial masculinities, driven by the sustainable agriculture movement, values cooperation, avoids discourses of ‘toughness’, and readily experiments with new farming technology and practices (Barlett & Conger 2004).

Conceptions of gender linked to agriculture change over time. For example, historically in Andean agriculture, men were often tasked with field-based agriculture and women with pastoral work. As Andean agriculture became more intensive and commercial, soil degradation increased and crop fields cultivated by men encroached upon pastures and common spaces tended by women (Paulson 2003). The changes in Andean agriculture show how economic, ecological, and gender changes are connected and shape each other. Women farmers in the United States face significant institutional, interactional, and symbolic barriers to becoming independent (Keller 2014). US women dairy farmers, for example, have faced barriers when applying for farm credit, in everyday interactions with other (often male) farmers, and even in claiming an identity as a farmer and not as someone’s wife, as a gardener, nor as a hobby farmer. They work to deconstruct the heteronormative figures of the farmer as man and farm-wife as woman in a family unit of gendered labour. They also build new femininities around alternative agricultures of stewardship, community, and work (Shisler & Sbicca 2019). Since concepts such as ‘farmer’, ‘good farmer’ or ‘farming masculinity’ are collectively defined, they remain open to the creation and defense of alternative understandings of gender.

More recent studies suggest that, beyond agricultural practices and attitudes, different ontologies of agriculture may exist. Oil palm cultivation in West Papua is commonly framed in Western worldviews as a conflict between local Indigenous groups and agribusiness. However, to local Marind people the palm itself is a malevolent, anti-social person that haunts dreams (Chao 2018). To take a second example, settler colonialism can be rightly viewed as a conflict over land, belonging, and property. Yet this interpretation may betray fundamental differences in how white settlers and Indigenous communities relate to land (Burow, Brock & Dove 2018). Indigenous communities simultaneously fight for the right to access land and against anyone owning land as property. Thus, conflicts and differences in land use, land ownership, conservation, and degradation can extend beyond struggles over resources or values. Ontological struggles over land ownership and resource use question whether land can be owned at all, or if life can be defined through resources. They speak to broader conflicts between different ways of being in the world, speculative futures, and on-going experiences.

Environment: animals, climate, and soil

The anthropological study of farming has roots in human ecology: that is, in the study of the relationships between people’s political and economic lives and their natural environment. In earlier years, this meant the study of relatively closed agricultural systems and a focus on how culture impacted ecologies. A classic environmental ethnography about the Tsembaga Maring of New Guinea, for example, described a complex socio-ecological system of swidden (or slash and burn) agriculture which balanced fallow periods, pig population, acreage, and food calorie production. This complex system was managed by an intricate ritual cycle that connected spirits to the physical realities of the environment (Rappaport 1967).

Recent trends in anthropology emphasise plant and animal relationships, relationships with a changing climate, the idea that there is a two-way connection between ecologies and humans, and the possibility that their interplay may be generative of altogether new realities. In general, this can be seen as a shift from understanding linear relationships of action and ‘feedback’ to describing more complex relationships. It may also be a shift from the impact of humans on humans in food and agriculture to the impact of humans on non-human actors, worthy of study in their own right.

Taking such a more-than-human approach to ecologies that foregrounds non-human agency decentres people in order to better understand how humans and non-humans affect each other and change together. The Carolina Piedmont pig, for example, is a breed of pig that fetches a high market value, and is considered much more than a mere economic or natural resource. They are descended from hogs native to the Canary Islands and brought to North America by Spanish explorers, later to be abandoned on Ossabaw Island off the coast of the state of Georgia, where they became feral. Later, these pigs were driven from this island for threatening loggerhead turtles, and some ended up in farms in the Piedmont region of North Carolina. Today they are prized for their flavour, ‘authenticity’, and ability to thrive on marginal land (Weiss 2016). These pigs are the product of the Spanish conquest, their own biological adaptations to living in a marginal environment, government policies enacted to protect an endangered species, and the work of small farmers in North Carolina. This raises a methodological issue: while participant observation and ethnographic interviews with human subjects are incredibly valuable tools, an adequate description of the ecological complexities of agriculture may require ‘multispecies ethnography’ (Kirksey & Helmreich 2010; Ogden, Hall, & Tanita 2013). Seeking to understand how humans and non-humans act collectively may entail studying the lifecycle of farm animals that co-exist with human populations, or studying the interaction of fungi and plants that make crops grow well. This focus on change, emergence, and multispecies agency has inspired anthropologists to consider plants and animals as agents within production systems rather than as resources. They are changed by human action, but also change human action and thought.

Climate change is an unavoidable component of understanding how farmers engage in plant and animal production. Comparative and social studies of human adaptation and mitigation of climate change takes into account human adaptability to climate changes, but also humans’ attempts to reverse or slow them (Orlove 2005). Anthropologists document agricultural adaptations to climate change (such as seeking cooler fields at higher elevations, changing planting dates, or planting different crops) as well as cultural impacts of climate change. In Peru, for example, highland farmers are cultivating fields at higher elevations and selecting different seeds to adapt. Cultural institutions like the reciprocal work arrangements known as ayni, as well as seed sharing, support this transition (Sayre, Stenner & Argumedo 2019). Anthropologists may be positioned to facilitate adaptation to climate change, but their interventions are limited by local crop preferences, power dynamics, and ecological conditions other than climate change (Siregar & Crane 2011). In any case, they must understand the importance of sociocultural systems in climate change engagement, tensions between normative positions and adaptation, and how climate modeling interacts with everyday aspects of livelihoods (Crane 2010).

In moving toward an understanding of agriculture as a generative and relational process, anthropologists focus on more than just animals. Take the example of soil. Soil structures farmers’ lives and is structured by them (Kawa 2016). It is also subject to care or lack thereof, and soil care has material consequences, such as degradation or conservation (de la Bellacasa 2015). Soils are, in a very real way, generated by human activity, not just degraded or affected. For example, the soils of the Brazilian Cerrado are some of the oldest in the world, and humans played at least a partial role in creating them through repeated wildfires. Today, industrial farmers in the region fertilise these soils intensively. Large-scale farmers describe the land as wasteland and consider themselves experts who can convert a barren desert to a fertile breadbasket (Ofstehage 2018b). Yet the soil also induces farmers to change farming practices. In the Cerrado case, large-scale farmers adopt conservation tillage to reduce soil moisture loss in arid areas and learn to apply calcium carbonate to increase the soil pH. The farmers in this case use this encounter with the soil to create narratives of progress and expertise, claiming a role in improving the land and becoming expert farmers themselves. Land is generated out of biological and material ecosystems as well as forces of the state and capital in ways that shape how well-capitalised and technologically-advanced famers engage with it (Li 2014). Such relational aspects are reflected in studies that ask how alternatives to industrial agriculture can promote new interactions with soil, plants, and animals.

Looking forward

Two important trends in the literature on farming are studies of migrant farm workers and the situation of agriculture in times of epochal planetary change. Anthropologists have a rich history of studying farm labour on which recent scholarship builds. Seth Holmes followed migrant workers who fled Oaxaca due to violence and lack of jobs to labour camps on a Washington berry farm (Holmes 2013). His work connects the everyday lives of farmworkers to health, commodity markets, racism, and work. Similarly, in Brazil’s Northeast, landless farmers are recruited by intermediaries with kin and community relations to work on sugar cane plantations under dangerous conditions for little pay (de Menezes, da Silva & Cover 2012). Migrant sheepherders in Wyoming also work in a precarious and dangerous position as often undocumented workers. On top of that, they need to re-learn to shepherd under capitalist, business-oriented conditions and in a new natural environment (Krögel 2010). In India, the privatization of former commons has pushed landless farmers to migrate within the country and become farmworkers; their internal migration places greater pressure on local landless farmers (Breman 1985). In each of these cases, landlessness and market conditions drive migrants out of rural farming communities and into wage labour. They may at times own land or support communal ties in their original rural communities. Migrant farmworkers in the United States, for example, may work to support coffee farms in Veracruz (Núñez‐Madrazo 2007).

Anthropologists working with agricultural labourers increasingly decentre the farm site as they follow the flow and lives of mobile workers. Rural Indian farm workers are not only living in the countryside, but in moving in and out of agrarian and industrial work, they often get fired and hired with little notice (Breman 1996). The movement of farmworkers from Mexico to the United States is more of a circuit than a migration. Migrants from small agricultural communities of Veracruz, Mexico choose to migrate North in response to worsening coffee incomes back home and a scarcity of workers to harvest the coffee in the US (Griffith et al. 2017). Their incomes from precarious work in the United States then subsidise coffee farms in their home of Veracruz and, having few long-term permanent contracts and facing unfriendly immigration policies, their work in the United States remains temporary.

Studies of farming and agriculture in anthropology are also placing farming within the context of epochal planetary change characterised differently as the ‘Plantationocene’, ‘Capitalocene’, and ‘Anthropocene’. Donna Haraway (2015) suggests that world agriculture is becoming abstracted from place as plants, workers, and land are abstracted from local contexts and brought together again in contemporary plantations. She and other feminist political ecologists call our era the ‘Plantationocene’, to describe this abstraction and mobility of people and plants as well as the racialised work on plantations and farms (Haraway et al. 2016). Similar work shows that plantation farms are characterised by relationships of fixity in which labourers create enduring relationships with each other and the land (Besky 2017) and flexibility in which farm owners commodify land, work, and plants (Ofstehage 2018b). Jason Moore characterises the current era as the ‘Capitalocene’, as he finds it’s driven not by human activity in general, but capitalist human activity. Building on the theory that capitalism may lead to environmental collapse (also known as ‘metabolic rift’), he suggests that the on-going destruction of land and other means of production is not critical for capital, but rather increases the commodification of life and expands capital further (Moore 2012). Socio-ecological crisis in the Capitalocene may expand commodity frontiers as farmers look for cheaper land and labour. The ‘Anthropocene’, or the global era defined by human activity, is also made manifest in farming. This happens differently across distinctive farming landscapes as farmers everywhere have specific encounters and interactions with landscapes. Everywhere, they leave the land and themselves changed (Mathews 2018). As this recent work demonstrates, studies of farming can be informative of far more than food production – we learn about markets, work, environment, value, race, and gender in the way farming is and is not done.

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Note on contributor

Dr. Andrew Ofstehage grew up on a small corn and soybean farm in South Dakota. He earned his doctorate at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill for his work on land, labour, and value among transnational soy farmers in Brazil. He holds a Master of Science from Wageningen University for his ethnographic work with quinoa famers and middlewomen in Bolivia and a Bachelor of Science in Agronomy from South Dakota State University. He is now a postdoctoral associate at Cornell University.

Andrew Ofstehage, 240D Warren Hall, Development Sociology, Cornell University, Ithaca, NY 14850, United States. alo52@cornell.edu.alofstehage@gmail.com.

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House and home

Felix Stein — Mon, 09 Dec 2019 10:11:58 +0000

Farhan Samanani Johannes Lenhard

Initially published 9 Dec 2019

http://doi.org/10.29164/19home

Abstract:

If asked to imagine home, most of us will come to think of a particular house or building. And, for many of us, the quintessential image of home remains the place we grew up in. This close association between house and home has long marked anthropological literature. And yet, when we imagine home, it is often not the structures themselves but the feelings, practices, and relationships within familiar spaces which give home a powerful sense of belonging. Home may be the scent of a grandmother’s cooking, the familiar fuzz of a worn cushion, the seemingly defiant thrill of hanging posters on the wall as a teenager, or the knot of tension in the stomach of a child listening to an argument in the adjoining room. Recent anthropological studies have hence looked beyond physical structures to understand home in terms of a diverse array of practices, meaningful and imaginative forms, and feelings which surround a sense of groundedness within the world. Understood in such terms, home becomes something much less solid than a structure of stone or wood. It tends to be contestable and fragile, a domain not only of belonging but also of potential alienation when attempts to make home fail or are subverted. This flourishing literature increasingly suggests that while physical shelter may be a basic existential need, it is houses and homes, wrapped up in the desire and struggle for belonging, which underpin human sociality.

Introduction

The study of home within anthropology, and within the social sciences more broadly, occupies a curious position. On the one hand, houses, homes, and practices of homemaking have been an inescapable background within anthropological writing throughout the discipline’s history. Houses and homes have been recognised as an essential ground upon which many of the most prominent theoretical questions of social science unfold, from the nature of kinship, to the reproduction of class and gender differences, to the shaping of sensory knowledge. On the other hand, however, houses and homes often remain out of focus, with their ability to ground and shape social life simply taken for granted and lacking analytical elaboration. They tend to be the mere background to the ‘real’ objects of analysis. The intimacy and idiosyncrasy of home spaces can threaten to confound efforts to consider broader questions of social reproduction or social transformation. And yet it may well be that no one lives without a home, and that home plays an inescapable role in defining who we are.

This entry traces anthropological attempts to think through the significance of houses and homes in shaping our lives. Given the persistent gap between the centrality of home to most of human life, and its peripheral position within most social science, these attempts represent fertile analytic starting points for the study of social life more broadly. For heuristic purposes, this entry presents ‘house’ and ‘home’ as distinct but related entities. It takes the ‘house’ to be the material and often-generic form of the home in a given society. Thus, the house points here to familiar physical structures in streets and neighbourhoods, which mainly take shape through the practices of planners, architects, craftspeople, and builders. The house, however, also refers to the idea of houses or households as typical social institutions, defined by dominant norms. In contrast, the notion of ‘home’ emphasises the subjective sense of being rooted within the world. Both ‘house’ and ‘home’ exist simultaneously as physical entities, subjective feelings, and as objects of various discourses which seek to shape, reinforce, or contest the forms they take. Both entities do not always map neatly onto one another. ‘Home’ may refer more to imaginary spaces, or to bodily practices rather than physical structures, while houses, as sites of labour, conflict, and tension, may be at times fundamentally unhomely.

The house: from symbolism to social reproduction

The conceptual distinction between house and home is a relatively recent one, and for many years anthropologists did not give much importance to either concept. Early scholars such as Lewis Henry Morgan (1981[1881]), writing on American aboriginal houses, or Bronislaw Malinowski, who defined the family as a group of kin tied to ‘a definite physical space, a hearth and home’ (see Collier, Rosaldo & Yanagisako 1987), saw the physicality and particularity of the home as secondary. When homes appeared within anthropological accounts, they ‘tend[ed] to be thought of as a “case” of symbolism or cosmology rather than a subject in their own right’ (Humphrey 1988: 16). In addition to being seen as a symbol indicating particular cultural beliefs, earlier generations of anthropologists also saw the house mostly as a container or setting for those social relations, such as kinship, which were taken to be of primary interest (Carsten & Jones 1995). While the home environment certainly mattered in earlier anthropological work, it did so because it was seen as an important element within broader meaningful orders, or as symbolically-laden stages, upon which important social dramas such as marriage or initiation rites played out.

Two seminal works by Pierre Bourdieu and Claude Lévi-Strauss both reflect this approach, but also mark the beginning of a shift in focus towards unpacking the role of houses in fundamental social processes: Lévi-Strauss (1983) wrote on ‘house societies’, defined as societies where elite power was organised via the institution of often noble ‘houses’, which bundled together familial descent, land, power and wealth. In such societies, including the Native American Yurok and Kwakiutl as well as medieval European societies, Lévi-Strauss argued that noble houses played a critical role in sustaining society by encompassing forms of power that might otherwise be in tension (1983). For instance, marriages within noble houses turned allies into kin, reconciling the tension that might have existed between maintaining distinct family groups and interests, and the desire to build cross-cutting alliances (Lévi-Strauss 1983: 187). This approach continued to see houses as ‘containers’. However, in contrast to earlier works, the act of containment itself was now highlighted as playing a critical role in sustaining the social processes it encompassed.

Meanwhile, Bourdieu’s famous essay on the Kabyle house traced how corresponding distinctions of light/dark, public/private, and male/female sat at the heart how the Kabyle people, a Berber group living in the Atlas mountains, viewed the world (1992 [1970]). These distinctions not only shaped public conduct and religious belief, but were also manifest in the very layout, furnishings, and domestic routines which made up the Kabyle house, as well as in everyday domestic routines. In Bourdieu’s account, the physical organization of the Kabyle house not only reflected this structured worldview, but was also responsible for reproducing it. This argument would find full expression in his later theory of ‘habitus’, which he came to characterise as ‘a system of predispositions inculcated by the material circumstances of life and by family upbringing’ (Bourdieu 1976: 118). Although Bourdieu’s later work does not deal with the house at the same level of empirical or conceptual detail (Atkinson 2016), it is clear within his theory that houses are important sites for learning embodied habits and internalising specific values. Thus, as anthropologists began to focus on the home itself, it was largely through physical houses. For Lévi-Strauss, houses literally and conceptually encompassed and mediated relations, while for Bourdieu the structured, material form of the house became the primary ground for social reproduction.

In many ways, the first surge of attention flowing from the study of houses into the realm of homes has followed from the meeting of these two approaches, revealing that houses and homes are spaces where relations were not only reproduced, but actively mediated: a point made in an important volume by Stephen Hugh-Jones and Janet Carsten (1995). This new understanding of house and home has been illustrated in different ways. In her study of Malay domestic life, Carsten (1997) puts the hearth at the centre of the house: it is the place where the family meets, where food is prepared, and where kinship is made through the transformation and sharing of substances. She argues that ‘[h]earths are obvious sources of physical sustenance, but they are also often the symbolic focus of the house, loaded with the imagery of the commensal unity of close kin. Houses are material shelters as well as ritual centres’ (Carsten 2003:55). By sharing food, kinship is made and reproduced (many Malay express the two concepts as being like siblings). Here, the physical and symbolic dimensions of domestic life are not easily separated. Rather, as other authors have also argued, it is the physical enactment of kin relations, and their direct involvement in sustaining life through forms of care and nourishment, which give these relations weight and reality, investing them with memory and feeling (see Martens & Scott 2006; de Pina-Cabral 1986). Such attention to care, unity, and togetherness also brought questions of homeliness into focus, alongside matters of material wellbeing, collective ritual, and social reproduction.

Likewise, the making of a house and the making of a marriage can often be closely linked, as was the case among the Zafimaniry in Madagascar when studied by Maurice Bloch (1995). As a married couple’s house becomes stronger – ‘grows bones’, as several Zafimaniry put it – and transforms into a hardwood construction over time, the relationship of the married couple becomes more stable. No longer separating out broader social processes from the house itself, Bloch instead argued that house and marriage were interdependent. For married couples, in fact, key moments and challenges in a solidifying marriage, such as the birth of the first child, were intertwined with on-going processes of renovating and decorating the house. As the family unit matured, and took on wider roles and responsibilities, the physical structure of the Zafimaniry house grew increasingly solid and ornate, both reflecting this maturity and significance and contributing to it.

Anthropologists have also highlighted the role played by houses in producing a distinctive mode of economic organisation, known as the ‘house economy’ (Gudeman & Rivera 1990) or the ‘domestic mode of production’ (Sahlins 1972). Following a theory developed by Alexander Chayanov in relation to peasant economies, Sahlins describes household production as defined by the needs of the domestic unit – and as such as relatively low. In a parallel way, Stephen Gudeman and Alberto Rivera observed how their informants sustained their agricultural livelihoods in an increasingly market-driven world, drawing on fieldwork with farming communities, first in Panama in the late 1960s, and then in Columbia from the 1970s onwards. Here, material practices were organised through the house (Gudeman & Rivera 1990: 2). While ‘both the house and the corporation are means for accomplishing material tasks’, the house economy is distinct in that it is ‘smaller, […] locally based and wholly or partly produces its own means of maintenance’ (Gudeman & Rivera 1990: 10). This organization enabled the household to pursue goals and modalities of mutuality, as well as individual well-being, distinct from but connected with the imperatives of the market. As such, Gudeman and his collaborators describe the house as the basic unit of economic life connected to others through bonds of exchange – while striving to be self-sufficient – and embedded in communities (Gudeman & Hann 2015). Again, the role of the house in mediating these relations and in the re-production of the family and the household is key.

Gudeman’s work ties in with approaches that emphasise the house as a sort of technology, which brings people together and mediates their relations with others, far beyond the confines of their economic existence. This argument is set out by Donna Birdwell-Pheasant and Denise Lawrence-Zuñiga in the introduction to their volume, Home life:

Both households and families use houses more than as settings for activities of production and distribution or as consumer goods. They are also mechanisms of communication, which channel and regulate social interaction among family members and between separate households. […] The house defines a place that belongs to a particular set of people and also defines, through co-residence and shared usage, the set of people that belong to a particular place. (1999: 3)

In each of these cases, although houses and homes are understood as playing an essential role in reproducing social relations, this reproduction cannot be taken for granted. Houses, homes, and those people within do not simply take up a pre-given place within an ordered cosmos. Rather, social reproduction is revealed as an often idiosyncratic process, where different individuals and families work to take up, challenge, or reinterpret given and familiar social roles. Houses and homes play a key role in such processes, mediating between individuals and society. Their construction and arrangement, as well as the kin relations which come together to create a ‘household’, often follow and reproduce existing social patterns. At the same time, the material and social resources of households are taken up in creative ways. As such, houses and homes situate individuals and families within society: not identically, but always in particular locations.

Assembling home: materialist approaches

If one strand of anthropological attention focused on the role of houses and homes in social reproduction, another strand has asked on how homes, and acts of homemaking, shape subjects themselves. Instead of examining the role of homes in sustaining or remaking key social institutions, the family, or labour, these approaches have looked more closely at the variety of lives and relationships that unfold within the home. They have focused more closely on questions of what it means to eke out a sense of belonging, security, and worth within and through the home, but also on the tensions that can emerge between different members of a household when feelings of belonging, security, or value do not align. In highlighting the subjective stakes of homes and homemaking, such work also begins to suggest a contrast between the house and household on one hand – which might be understood as a social institution, reflecting dominant norms – and the home, which might be understood as including feelings of rootedness, safety, and value.

The contrast between a physical ‘house’ and a subjective sense of ‘home’, however, is not hard and fast. Instead, as work on the materiality of the home has shown, houses are often made into homes through the reworking of their material forms. Renovation, decoration, and furnishing, for example, help transform houses from generic expressions of familiar forms into places which tell the story of distinct, personal lives and relationships. This has been shown in a study of residents on a North London council estate (Miller 1988). Danny Miller documented how residents decorated and renovated their council flats in ways which both reflected their class position but also inflected this position with a personal sense of identity and belonging. Focusing not on homes themselves, but on the possessions and consumption practices that concentrate within their walls, Miller has continued to examine the importance of material objects for developing a sense of home. These objects include fitted kitchens, furniture, and knickknacks, but also the materials of the flats themselves such as concrete, wood, or brick which channel noise, light, and warmth. They allow homes to express not only given social meanings but the particularity of individual biographies and interpersonal relations (2009; 2001; 1998). As a result, the objects in one’s home are simultaneously involved in placing oneself in broader society, creating relationships of care, and developing a personal sense of biography, whereas the home both facilitates and reflects these interwoven processes. Together, home, the possessions which fill it, and the memories attached to both, shore up our sense of identity and belonging against the tribulations we might face in the outside world (Miller 2001). The physical permanence of material objects, and their peculiar mode of assembly within the home, serve as durable sources of security (Petridou 2001). The subject, the inhabitant of the home, as Elia Petridou argues in her study of Greek students’ homes in Britain, is advanced through the ‘interaction with objects’. These objects could be furniture but also food, which is less place-bound; their totality and the security that accompanies them is in part based on an understanding of home as a ‘sensory totality’ (Petridou: 88). As such, for Miller (2009; 2001; 1998) and others (see also Gregson 2007; Dittmar 1992; Daniels & Andrews 2010; Cieraad 2006), creating a sense of home is directly linked to activities like shopping for material goods, arranging furniture in the rooms or narrating stories and memories of different objects. Shifting the focus onto materiality helps clarify a distinction between the physical house, whose forms often follow dominant norms, and a felt sense of home, which plays with and reinvents these forms, without necessarily subverting them.

On a more macro-level, anthropologists studying architecture and urban planning have highlighted that the material qualities of our surroundings work to shape bodies, habits, and mobility in line with broader social patterns (see Buchli 2013 for an overview). Following Bourdieu, they ask how houses impart particular social understandings and roles, often focusing less on individual houses or homes, and more on housing as a form of infrastructure (see Larkin 2013 for a review of infrastructural approaches). Thus, specific forms of architecture can give colonial aspirations physical form (e.g. Rabinow 1995 on France and its former colonies). In addition, specific features of houses, such as gates, tend to structure social relations. They may create class and race-based enclaves, as in American upper class suburbs, where segregated communities are established around singular houses or groups of them (Low 2003). On an intra-house level, Christine Helliwell (1996) studying the Dayak in Borneo, or the contributors to Beyond kinship (Joyce & Gillespie 2000) on various other house societies, go into detail of how houses and their architectural design restrict bodies, channel sensory awareness, produce sociality, or provoke interventions (e.g. in response to a quarrelling couple). While partitions – often flimsy and transparent – can create a division between private and public, they can also lead to forms of sociality. Likewise, changing housing conditions can be used to structure and sustain political outcomes. For example, moving Chicago ‘project’ residents into newer, mixed-income buildings led them to lose access to the free and effective heating systems of their former homes. Thereby, the residents were subject to a ‘sensory push’ towards becoming better workers and consumers, who bore the risks of their own survival individually (Fennell 2011). Many approaches which look at houses as infrastructure are grounded in actor-network theory, which in its most radical iterations refuses to see houses as stable objects at all, but instead approaches them as collections (or ‘assemblages’) of objects, materials, and processes, all of which exert agency and make demands on people in particular ways (e.g. Vokes 2013).

On the other hand, a range of works on the home has focused on emotion and affect, where affect denotes forms of bodily perception that slip below conscious detection and are frequently hard to put into words. Affects often have a strong material basis, which is why the material arrangement of homes can serve to suffuse them with specific atmospheres of feeling (Daniels 2015; Olesen 2010). For example, in Jordanian Bedouin homes, the profusion of green-tinted windows fills them with a radiant green hue which evokes a sense of divine presence (Bille 2017). Specific forms of light are not simply a religious symbol. Rather, for instance, green light’s physical brilliance, immaterial nature and its ability to seep into spaces help construct deeply evocative feelings of piety and virtue. This helps householders make their claims to virtue visible to and felt by others, and it shapes domestic moods and interactions. As such, while the use of green light clearly reproduces dominant notions of piety and a public-private distinction, these values come to life in affective ways within individual households. They come about at the intersection of materiality, emotion, social relations, and the practices of dwelling, and they shape personal notions of home.

Re-making home: feminist and critical approaches

If homes have come to be seen as sites where people can negotiate and even contest their place in the world, then this is in no small part thanks to feminist writings on domestic labour and women’s lives. While the universalism of the specific, often Marxist concepts used to theorise women’s domestic efforts has often drawn criticism from anthropologists (Edholm, Harris & Young 1975; Strathern 1992), Marxist approaches, and the anthropological responses to them, have nonetheless productively focused attention on the domestic sphere as a domain of labour and creativity, as well as one holding the potential for alienation or exploitation.

For example, in her ethnography of a high-rise apartment building in Karachi, Laura Ring (2006) traces how inter-ethnic peace is the product of the relentless work of women’s domestic labour. Peace prevails despite on-going tensions between different nationalist factions who share the building, including Sindhis, Punjabs, and Muhajirs. As they went about their lives together, the female residents would exchange gossip, share fashion and grooming tips and preferences, reflect on questions of religious practice and belief, or help one another navigate family tensions. These seemingly-mundane interactions worked to build bonds between households, offering both men and women a localised counternarrative to stories of irreparable political and ethnic divides. Ironically, the success of these small, everyday efforts could make the state of friendship, care, and peace in the apartment building appear to some (including the ethnographer, initially) as if this were simply a natural state, rather than a product of sustained work.

In documenting the everyday labours involved in making a home, feminist scholars have also called for more careful attention to tensions between exploitation and belonging, and between social change and social reproduction. For example, Lila Abu-Lughod, studying Awlad 'Ali Bedouin women in Egypt (1990; 1986) traces how ostensibly oppressive norms of public male honour and private female modesty are creatively taken up by women to claim power for themselves. By echoing men’s insistence over strict separations between men and women within the home, women eke out space to smoke, scheme, and share household secrets. They invert their formal deference to men, while retaining their claim to modesty and virtue. These practices can often become forms of resistance, challenging power dynamics within households and potentially driving broader social change. Thus, traditional Bedouin marriage tends to involve elder relatives selecting a woman’s betrothed, with little input from the bride herself, and with financial support for the couple expected to come from kin. However, women may resist such practices by asserting their own desirability, chafing at the obligations this practice produces, and remaining enchanted with the idea of a spouse with an independent income. Through buying lingerie or makeup, they assert a role for desire – both theirs and that of their husbands – in determining marriages. Such assertions reshape power dynamics within and between households, granting women more power over prospective and actual husbands, as orchestrators of desire. They also reposition the home as a more private space between husbands and wives, one shaped by consumer goods, and less dependent on kin.

Lives within the home can be constrained by multiple, intersecting forms of power, from gendered hierarchies to the power of the state. Yet, even under what may seem like desperate or desolate circumstances, home can serve as a site of creative response and as a repository for hopes and dreams. This is illustrated in Clara Han’s (2012) striking ethnography of slum households in Santiago, Chile, where she traces home as a site of ‘active awaiting’. Living in a present where the possibilities for life are tightly constrained by debt, gang violence, and the punitive force of the state, Han nonetheless traces how small interventions in the home – the pawning of a beloved music player, or the sheltering of a relative away from an abusive partner – create small spaces in which new, perhaps unknown possibilities can take root and grow.

This emphasis on interpersonal relationships, on belonging, security, and worth, and on power and contestation, remain rooted in the house, as a physical space, but move beyond it in emphasising the subjective dimensions of home. For instance, classic analyses of hospitality may focus on how, for hosts, acts of hospitality may serve to enact the authority and moral standing of householders, and how such domestic sovereignty relates to broader forms of cultural and state authority (e.g. Herzfeld 1987). In contrast, recent studies of homes on the margins (e.g. Han 2012) have come to ask how homes mediate and constrain the very possibilities of caring for others, as hosts or otherwise, as a fragile and often fraught enterprise. Even in studies focused on physical houses and other structures, home often comes to life not as a symbolic or material form, but as an experiential and relational category.

Supporting this shift in focus away from physical structures to lived forms have been critiques of western understandings of home, as a product of capitalist modernity. Over the course of the twentieth century, western understandings of home have centred around the idea of a privately-owned dwelling, occupied by a nuclear family (Dupuis & Thorns 1996; Madigan, Munro & Smith 1990). These have been coupled with philosophically inspired works drawing on phenomenological (Ingold 2011) or existential traditions (Jackson 2005) to ask what it means for people to have a place within the world. From these impetuses, a growing body of work has approached the concept of ‘home’ not as a typical or identifiable institution, operating to reproduce given forms of authority, but instead as a name for the on-going efforts and dreams of people to secure a place or sense of belonging in the world, something felt, lived, imagined, or struggled for.

Home as a process and ideal

If the understandings of home explored above remain grounded in the notion of a physical house, occupying a fixed geographical location, a further set of perspectives engage with representations and practices of home more widely. Home and the processes linked to it are not necessarily material, and even when they are, they do not need to be linked to a house. Home may evoke the notion of a homeland, whose material basis lies in the smells of street foods, the cadence of a dialect, or the grand architecture of symbolic monuments. Yet, homelands may also be predominantly imaginative entities. This is the case, for example, with the Sikh ‘homeland’ of Khalistan, which exists as a yet-to-be realised nationalist vision, amongst local and émigré activists, who frequently discuss such visions online (Axel 2004). Linked to the imagination are the practical habits which produce and reproduce a sense of home, and which may persist in doing so, even in the absence of a fixed material basis. Particularly in situations where a material home is not immediately available, as in states of homelessness, refuge, or migration, the imagination, memory, and practices of homemaking become crucial to sustain a sense of stability and security. Homeless people, for example, may establish a sense of home in terms of their daily routines, moving through city streets, collecting new materials for temporary shelters, begging, and meeting with friends and familiar faces. In this way, they do not just structure their day, but also their surroundings (see Veness 1993; Lenhard, forthcoming).

Home may thus be seen as always in-between the real and the ideal and imaginative (Mallett 2004). It can relate to ‘the activity performed by, with or in a person's things and places. Home is lived in the tension between the given and the chosen, then and now’ (Mallett 2004: 80). As Shelley Mallett argues, ‘people spend their lives in search of home, at the gap between the natural home and the particular ideal home where they would be fully fulfilled’ (2004: 80). This analysis links ideas about home as a future (ideal) homeland inspired by past experience to notions of home in the present. It foregrounds that homes are made and have a procedural quality to them.

Catherine Brun and Anita Fabos (2015) position the idea of home-as-process at the centre of their work inspired by different contexts of migration. They describe home as a set of everyday practices, while ‘such practices involve both material and imaginative notions of home and may be improvements or even investments to temporary dwellings; they include the daily routines that people undertake [...] and the social connections people make’ (Brun and Fabos 2015:12). This view of home builds on Mary Douglas’ (1991) classic minimal definition of the home, as the act of bringing a particular space under control. For Douglas, a home is first and foremost a localised activity of ordering and control in the present, produced through accumulating meaningful objects and through enacting familiar routines in a certain space (see also Easthope 2004; O’Mahony 2013). Douglas continues her analysis in the following way:

home is always a localizable idea. Home is located in space but it is not necessarily a fixed space. It does not need bricks and mortar, it can be a wagon, a caravan, a board, or a tent. It need not be a large space, but space there must be, for home starts by bringing some space under control (1991: 289).

From this perspective, making a home is about finding a daily structure, regular rhythms, and constructing routines (Easthope 2004: 135; O’Mahony 2013). April Veness (1993), who worked with homeless people in Delaware in the late 1980s, stresses the importance of habits, rhythms, and routines for making home — often as mundane as routinely visiting certain neighbourhoods, shelters, and food kitchens. Veness found that installing a temporal order to the day as well as the environment was a key part of peoples’ daily home-making.

Julie Botticello (2007) takes the notion of home further away from a fixed dwelling towards a ‘site of practices where comfort, familiarity, and intimate sociality occur’ (2007: 19; see also Capo 2015). In her study of Nigerians living in London, Botticello not only looks at a newly constructed home of immigrants but also at how a sense of home does not have to be limited to domestic, private space. Instead, home extends into the public realm of the street, of outdoor markets. The home-as-process, built on practices and routines, does not have to involve a fixed structure. It denotes a ‘highly complex system of ordered relations with place, an order that orientates us in space, in time, and in society’ (Dovey 1985: 39). All this takes us not just into the everyday rhythm of routine and practice, but to the ways in which such practices unfold over vaster spaces and longer periods of time.

Thus, imagined, in-process homes may be grounded in nostalgia – a feeling of reaching backwards in time that is already present in its Greek root (ὅμοιος [homoios]), which relates to homesickness. Memories and a yearning for a past home are often part of home imaginaries. Coming from the field of migration studies, Brun and Fabos (2015) define this idea of what they call HOME (in all capitals) as the ‘geopolitics of nation and homeland’ (13). It symbolizes an often idealised return to the cultural environment of one’s past. Georgia Doná (2015: 69) analyses this nostalgia as the ‘memories of, longing for, and imaginations of homes that are idealized’, anchoring this longing in a conglomerate of sanitised prior experiences. The idea of home as ‘homeland’ figures strongly in the social science literature on migration and refugees. In her study of refugees in Georgia, Brun (2015) finds that return and repatriation are greatly important for the people she worked with who were escaping from the Georgian war in the late 1990s. Here, home has to do first of all with an ‘absence’ of ‘social relations and practices possible to enact in the familiar home environment’ (Brun 2015: 7). It is related to a feeling of nostalgia for the home of the past. Brun’s informants think of home primarily as a (lost) homeland, both in the sense of a country and a cultural routine that includes taste, language, people, and, particularly, family. Home might therefore be understood firstly as an imagined entity that carries what Liz Kenyon (1999) calls a right to return and a place of origin (Birdwell-Pheasant & Lawrence-Zuniga 1999). It is a place we depart from and have a desire to return to (Hobsbawm 1991). In their review of the literature on homelessness and home, Peter Kellett and Jeanne Moore (2003) position the concept of home in between personal and collective-cultural memory and desire: ‘certain aspects of home seemingly shape and motivate homeless people’s experience and behaviour […] and the desire for [it] acts as a powerful personal and cultural objective’ (124, 128). Likewise, for people in situations of displacement, Brun and Fabos (2015) argue that ‘understandings of home are often based on the past: people long for the home they lost’ (7). In this sense, home is immediately connected to the yearning and desire for a better future.

Caroline Humphrey (2005), in her historical analysis of Soviet shared houses and apartment blocks, shows that the imagination of different futures is likewise part of making a home. In the Russian city of Magnitogorsk, near the border with Kazakhstan, where workers’ dwellings were often built around a central public living space, workers would frequently adapt such public space according to their personal routines and imagination rather than necessarily follow Soviet collectivist ideals. Here, the ‘comforts of everyday domestic practices (byt) gradually invaded the austere spaces of even the exemplary Soviet Nakomfin apartment house’ (Humphrey 2005: 40). The infrastructure and built environment interacted with the ‘imaginative and projective inner feelings of the people’; together they were ‘mutually constitutive of fantasy’, pointing to a different possibility for living, for instance in carving out private spaces where quiet conversations could take place (Humphrey 2005: 40, 43).

The idea of home as something located largely in an imagined future is even more striking in Sara Ahmed’s (1999) study of migrants’ writing, particularly Asian women living in Britain. She found that home is often a destination, a place to travel to:

The space which is most like home, which is most comfortable and familiar, is not the space of inhabitance — I am here — but the very space in which one finds the self as almost, but not quite, at home. In such a space, the subject has a destination, an itinerary, indeed a future, but in having such as destination, has not yet arrived (Ahmed 1999: 331).

According to Ahmed, home is quintessentially not about the present, but about one’s hopes, about a future place where one has not yet arrived (also Bloch 1995) and which might be related to an idealised past homeland. This is particularly true for refugees, for whom idealised, imagined, or remembered homes play a particularly strong role, not simply in maintaining a sense or hope of rootedness, but in impelling their movement in search of such homes (Jansen & Löfving 2011; Doná 2015)

Jeanne Moore brings together this focus on an imagined future with the importance of daily routines in discussing homeless migrants, arguing that ‘[h]ome is a powerful desire for many homeless people […] this desire is shaped by particular goals and lifestyles’ (2000: 212). Many homeless people continuously ‘struggle along’ in the present, longing for a better home in the future: a place to sleep and a way to have meaningful relationships, as well as objects (Hecht 1998; Desjarlais 1994).

For refugees, the homeless, and many others, remembered homes may lack a sense of homeliness and security all together. Cristiana Strava (2017), writing of life in the Hay Mohammadi neighbourhood in Casablanca, explores how histories of state violence create a sense of precarity, uncertainty, and insecurity that gave homes an air of unhomeliness. Here, violence is marked in the remains of an old secret prison, or in the rebuilding of the neighbourhood to facilitate military control, dispossession, and enduring poverty. Strava traces the ambivalent responses to such feelings of unhomeliness. Residents of Hay Mohammadi sometimes strive to contain or move beyond such feelings through daily acts of care, which push back on historic narratives of abandonment or unscrupulous landlords alike. Yet daily care can also become implicated in reproducing unhomeliness, such as when broken plumbing, or tiny spaces, both of which evoke continued abandonment or exclusion, nonetheless come to be accommodated within everyday routines. In such circumstances, lived experiences of dwelling may themselves not be the primary anchor for hopes, dreams, or ideals of home. Speaking to such circumstances, Stef Jansen (2009) claims that, rather than seeing home as a ‘remembered site of belonging’, it should be seen ‘prospectively as a socially constituted object of longing’ (2009: 57; see also Jansen & Löfving 2011). Thus, as imaginative spaces that stretch out across time and are brought about through practice, homes are never static.

A final tension worth mentioning is that between alienated and unalienated characterizations of home. On the one hand, when explored in terms of familiar routines, closely held ideals, or a site of comfort or intimacy, home emerges as a domain where subjects’ sense of who they are is bolstered and reproduced. Here, home is the space, the practice, or the imagined idyll where alienation might be undone. On the other hand, however, both imagined and physical homes may be sites of displacement: places where one is made to feel out-of-place or even threatened, places which evoke ideals that have not yet materialised, or something which is in need of continual, ungratifying labour. In these conceptions, home is characterised by a distancebetween subjects’ sense of selfhood, and their experience of home. It can thus be a domain that contributes to a sense of alienation, experienced as exclusion, dislocation, instability, or simply a desire for something other than what is given. In many cases, alienation and its escape may be present in the same account. For instance, the migrant women whose lives Ahmed traces try to make home in the everyday even as their experiences are often characterised by a sense of unhomeliness. In spite of present alienation, they see in the future the promise of an ideal, unalienated home. Alienation and its opposite continue to remain in tension, negotiated across space and time, through contending imaginaries, or through differently oriented practices.

Conclusion

The house and the home have had a varied life in anthropological thought and observation. Developing from an early focus on the house as a social institution, it was first understood as a way of ordering society, a site of practice, and a structure of social reproduction. Houses and homes have also been explored as sites of subject formation, of belonging and security – or the breakdown thereof. Shaped in part by their material underpinnings, domestic processes were constantly being rearranged, reworked, cared for, and reproduced through the efforts of various sorts of domestic labour. Anthropological approaches have recently begun to develop and elaborate a distinction between the house and the home, wherein houses involve normative, widely reproduced, and often material forms, while homes centre around the subjective feelings of belonging and dwelling. This distinction emerged in part through a growing understanding of how households could be sites of unhomeliness, whether for women faced with unvalued domestic labour, or for those living with displacement or the everyday realities of poverty or state violence. Temporal dimensions, from an idealised past to an imagined future, have featured heavily in recent studies. At the same time, a processual notion of home, often as a form of ordering without necessarily being confined to localised spaces of houses, has also become important. The spaces brought under control, in processes of home making, do not however have to be precisely localised. Home-making stretches across time as well as space, and even in the blatant absence of a physical home, the act of home-making often remains a focus point of daily practice.

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Note on contributors

Farhan Samanani explores questions of value, diversity, and community in contemporary London. His work looks at forms of value, understanding, and cooperation which emerge out of everyday life, and traces what happens to these everyday projects within broader political and economic systems. Farhan’s work spans across disciplines, from social anthropology to human geography and political science, and emphasises collaborations with community groups and local and national organizations to create meaningful change. He is currently based at the Max Planck Institute for the Study of Religious and Ethnic Diversity.

Dr Farhan Samanani, Max Planck Institute for the Study of Religious and Ethnic Diversity, Hermann-Föge-Weg 11, 37073 Göttingen, Germany. farhan.samanani@gmail.com.

Johannes Lenhard is an ethnographer of inequality in the west, currently based at the Max Planck Cambridge Centre Cambridge for Ethics, Economy and Social Change. Having worked towards a better understanding of homeless people in London and Paris for his PhD, he has recently started a new research project on venture capital investors with fieldwork in Munich, Berlin, London, San Francisco and New York. His writing has appeared in academic peer-reviewed journals as well as journalistic outlets, such as Aeon, the Conversationand Crunchbase.

Dr Johannes Lenhard, Kings College, CB21ST Cambridge, United Kingdom. jfl37@cam.ac.uk

Mining

Felix Stein — Tue, 01 Oct 2019 08:16:53 +0000

Alex Golub

University of Hawai‘i at Mānoa

Initially published 1 Oct 2019

http://doi.org/10.29164/19mining

Abstract:

Mining has occurred for thousands of years, and social anthropologists have studied it for almost a century. This entry explains anthropology's principle findings about mining, beginning with the lives of miners who participate in both large-scale mining (LSM) and artisanal and small-scale mining (ASM). It then discusses the politics of 'mining encounters' in which miners, local communities, and other stakeholders such as NGOs and the government engage in contests with each other to control mining and its positive and negative impacts. The entry then moves to discuss how minerals such as metals and gemstones are bought, sold, and valued, and what people do with the money they receive from mining. It closes with a brief consideration of the ethical challenges mining presents for anthropologists, and a discussion of what future topics in the anthropology of mining might be.

Introduction

People have extracted minerals from the earth for millennia and have thought, talked, and written about this activity for just as long. Since it would be impossible to survey everything in this vast and valuable literature, this entry will focus on the research findings of anthropologists or other social scientists who have conducted prolonged ethnographic fieldwork on mining and published results in English (for longer review articles, see Godoy 1985; Ballard & Banks 2003; Jacka 2018). The entry begins with the lives of mine workers and then 'zooms out' to look at wider spheres of mining, including 'mining encounters' (the politics created in a region by mining), and the lives of the traders and dealers who deal with minerals and gemstones once they have been wrested from the earth. Finally, this entry zooms out even further to address the professional ethics and politics of studying mining, and points to future directions for the anthropology of mining.

The lives of miners

Anthropologists have found it useful to divide mining into two forms: large-scale mining (LSM), which depends on substantive capital investment, and artisanal and small-scale gold mining (ASM). The lives of mine workers are shaped in fundamental ways by the techniques and technologies they use.

Large-scale mining

Anthropologists emphasise the danger and difficulty of large-scale mining, especially underground and unmechanised mining. This laborious work is intense and exhausting, and mine workers are frequently low-paid. The images of dirty and rough work that circulate in the press and popular media are largely accurate. And yet, how miners feel about their work has more to do with how it is interpreted than the physical nature of the work itself.

During the apartheid era, black gold miners in South Africa lived in conditions similar to soldiers or prisoners, complete with barracks, and demanding shiftwork (Moody 1994), a type of ubiquitous control which Erving Goffman calls a 'total institution' (1961). These unrewarding conditions became fertile grounds for unionization and worker solidarity. On the other hand, Elizabeth Ferry's book about a collectively owned mine in Mexico shows that workers see their mine as a form of patrimony to be passed down to their children, even as the silver they produce is sold into a global market (2005). While some workers resist authority, workers living in places with histories of patronage and hierarchy may embrace it (Rubbers 2010, Winchell 2017), and actively try to subordinate themselves to superiors in order to claim traditional rights over them. In these cases, mine owners who reject their role as boss and patron are the ones who may experience labour unrest. Miners in post-socialist countries were once celebrated as paragons of socialist virtue, but today often feel forgotten by a government and trade unions which once lionised them (Keskula 2016). Coal miners in the contemporary United States may see their work as a gift which provides electricity to consumers, and they may feel spurned and betrayed by middle class consumers who call for an end to coal and the rise of sustainable energy (Smith 2019).

Gender is another arena in which cultural context matters. At first glance, some might see LSM as a 'macho' male activity because it involves toughness, physical exertion, and violent force to disembed minerals from the earth. But this stereotype is misleading. Women have always worked as miners (Lahiri-Butt & Macintyre 2006), and gender roles in LSM can be quite variable. Second, male and female miners can 'undermine' gender stereotypes to create roles such as 'tough' female workers, who can endure pain and discomfort and 'softer' men who work in teams and ask for assistance as a key part of mine safety (Rolston 2014). These stereotypes are always multivalent: is the proper role of a strong man to unionise and fight for their rights, or to endure their lot with stoicism? It is in action that men and women deploy these stereotypes in practice (Finn 1998).

Folklorists have long noted that underground miners often believe mines to be inhabited by 'spirits' or other beings who must be propitiated in order for mining to be safe and successful. Anthropologists have also come to see these beliefs as more than mere superstition. In a classic early work on tin mining in Bolivia, June Nash shows that these rituals express metaphorically miners' accurate understanding of their lot: dependent upon mine ownership while also victimised by it (1979). This Marxist approach, echoed by Michael Taussig (1980), indicates the power and intelligence of miners’ collective imagination.

Artisanal mining

Artisanal mining (ASM) can range from the lone hobbyist who spends weekends panning for gold to organised teams of workers using backhoes and explosives. Some research shows that ASM can supplement farming and other subsistence activities, and the small but steady income derived from it may ultimately be more sustainable and evenly distributed than the massive influx of money that accompanies large-scale mining (Hilson 2002).

Artisanal mining can often create new moral orders and social relations. In Sudan, for instance, mining income frees miners from economic reliance on their parents, downplaying hierarchical sources of authority and creating new social networks among young miners (Calkins 2017). ASM can generate even more novel social orders. In some cases it can take the form of a 'rush' or 'boom' similar to the nineteenth century Pacific Rim gold rushes in California, Australia, and Alaska (Belich 2009: 306-22), and some authors have used Victorian metaphors of a mining 'frontier' to describe contemporary ASM mining camps (Bryceson & Geenen 2016). In some cases, these rushes occur in genuinely unoccupied land, such as the Mount Kare gold rush in Papua New Guinea (Henton & Flower 2007). In other cases, such as the Amazon gold rush of the 1980s (Cleary 1990), the land was occupied already, a fact that 'frontier' metaphors threaten to elide (Luning 2018).

In the nineteenth century, these rushes created a mobile population (Belich 2009: 306-20), which developed its own unique norms. Something akin to this occurs in some ASM communities today, for instance in West Africa, where miners establish their own novel social networks to mine, buy, and sell minerals (Grätz 2004, 2013). Contemporary gold camps are sometimes considered places of sexual excess and prostitution, as the nineteenth century camps were, but evidence from East Africa (Bryceson et al. 2014) and Indonesia (Mahy 2011) indicates that emergent forms of sexuality may free women from traditional roles and offer them avenues for agency that may be more be more beneficial and less exploitative than we might at first suspect.

ASM often occurs in remote areas, or areas which span national borders. As a result, ASM communities often regulate (or fail to regulate) activities typically within the remit of the government, such as pollution from mining (Beavis & McWilliam 2018) and conflict over access to minerals (Salman & de Theije 2017). Today, governments take a wide variety of approaches to ASM, ranging from making it illegal to attempts to recognise and formalise it.

Mine-affected communities and mining encounters

In addition to studying the lives of miners, anthropologists have also studied the political conflicts between stakeholders in mining such as companies, governments, local communities, and NGOs. Robert Pijpers and Thomas Hylland Eriksen have helpfully coined the term 'mining encounter' to describe these situations (2018).

Anthropologists have been very critical of what John Burton (2014) has called the 'Avatar narrative'. This is the idea, vividly portrayed in the 2009 science fiction film Avatar, that local communities are always innocent and environment-loving opponents of mining, while miners are always purely evil, exploitative, and rapacious. In fact, mining encounters are much more complicated than this. They almost always feature more than two stakeholders; stakeholder groups are composed of factions with different agendas; many different kinds of stakeholders may desire mine revenue or seek to protect the environment; and often individuals are members of more than one stakeholder group at once.

Damage and knowledge of the environment

Mining by definition involves destroying the environment, and there is a large literature devoted to studying this fact. Some anthropologists, such as Stuart Kirsch, see mining as a 'harm industry' in which massive damage to the environment is inevitable, despite industry claims that mining can be 'sustainable' (2014). Mining has a long history not only of planned and sanctioned environmental destruction, but also of catastrophic accidents (Eriksen 1976). Many anthropologists have documented these incidents. The damage mining does to the environment is real and severe.

At the same time, anthropologists often study less obvious and more complicated cases of environmental damage than the many empirically obvious ones. In doing so, they draw on science studies to examine how knowledge of the environment is created and how it is used in mining encounters. For instance, it is easy to say that exposure to radiation can harm uranium miners. But what amount of radioactive background crosses the line from 'safe' to 'dangerous'? And how can we detect and record radiation when it is not available to the senses and its effects may only be felt years afterwards (Hecht 2012)?

Fabiana Li calls the process by which environmental knowledge is created and contested 'stabilization'. In it, stakeholders work to generate facts about the environment that come to seem stable and true. Engineers may consider well water identical to water from a sacred glacier, but indigenous people may see them as radically different (Li 2015). Simply asserting the truth of science over indigenous ways of knowing empowers some stakeholders and disempowers others (and vice versa). Other actors may be involved in these epistemic processes. The Catholic Church has lent its imprimatur to scientists' attempts to document lead pollution in Peru, creating an unexpected juxtaposition of science and faith which nonetheless creates facts which can become 'politically actionable' (Graeter 2017).

At the broadest level, anthropologists have sought to understand how things in the world come to be seen as 'resources' at all. What techniques do engineers and scientists use to see the underground as 'ore' (Kinchie, Phadke & Smith 2018)? This speaks to a broader literature, one which studies how people conceptualise the environment such that some things can be seen discretely as 'resources' (Richards & Weszkalnys 2014). At the broadest level, anthropologies of mining take their place alongside political ecological approaches which study wildlife, crops, and endangered species, or even 'time' or 'diversity' amongst college students, which can be conceptualised as 'scarce' (Ferry & Limbert 2008).

Changing perceptions of space and time

Mining can radically alter the landscape where it takes place. Anthropologists have seen that mining's massive changes to the landscape affect people's understanding of themselves and the history of an entire community, as in the case of mountaintop removal in the United States (McNeil 2011). Similarly, many Mongolians are deeply embedded in a 'cosmoeconomics' attached to a landscape of sacred sites and familiar pasturages (High 2017). When these are altered or destroyed, deeply held cultural beliefs are fundamentally transformed. In some cases, land must be represented as 'wasteland', 'desert', or 'deserted' in order to justify the damage mining will do it, a process Voyles calls 'wastelanding' (2015). When these conceptions override or erase local senses of place, mining tends to be part of processes of dispossession and structural injustice.

Mining can also alter perceptions of time (D'Angelo & Pijpers 2018). Some communities look forward to mining revenues with an almost religious, apocalyptic enthusiasm (Bainton 2010). Others, particularly in areas which have been through several boom-bust cycles of mining, may develop cynicism or even dread of renewed mining (Halvaksz 2008). Once mining begins, people often feel like they are living through a special time, perhaps one of abundance or exciting uncertainty (Smith 2015). Stakeholders can sometimes play down the importance of the present, such as when failures of planning and development are written off as 'lessons learned' and stakeholders focus on a better-planned future (Wiegink 2017).

Identity and migration

Mining can also disrupt existing social relations and identities. Since mines must usually get local permission to operate, they frequently look to 'tribes' or 'clans' or 'local communities' to approve their construction and to receive a 'social license to operate' (Prno & Slocombe 2012). This often triggers processes of ‘ethnogenesis’, transforming old identities into new ethnic groups which claim to be 'traditional' owners (Jorgensen 1997). In some cases, mining encounters can lead to legal and political deadlock in which no one gets to use contested land, even when most parties want mining to begin (Oskarsson 2018). In cases where artisanal miners work gold in the vicinity of large-scale mining, autochthony can become a valuable part of social identity, enabling access to land that can be worked (Bolay 2014). At other times, traditional forms of authority, such as kingship in West Africa, may transform into a form of rentier landlordship (Smith 2018, Burton 1996).

Mining often spurs processes of mobility such as migration, radically altering life in a region where mining occurs. Some of the earliest anthropologists to study mining, members of Max Gluckman's 'Manchester school' (Werbner 1984), examined the Zambian Copper Belt in the 1930s and documented how large-scale mining's demand for labour created profound social change, including major flows of migration into mining areas, changes in gender roles, and rapid urbanization of rural communities (Richards 1939, Epstein 1981). Emigration frequently occurs in mining areas as well. Often, mining-affected communities are relocated or resettled to clear the way for mining, as in the case of Banaba Island, where the entire population was removed so the island could be mined for phosphate (Teaiwa 2014). These processes can have drastic impacts on communities (Own & Kemp 2016). Overall, migration continues to be a major topic in anthropology today (Bainton & Banks 2018)

Governance and corporate social responsibility

Mining can be difficult to govern, especially in the case of mining 'rushes' or when large-scale mines operate in countries that lack strong government to begin with. Often, large-scale mines assume the role of the state in providing governance, infrastructure, and services, creating a sort of 'shadow sovereignty' (Coyle 2015) or 'hybrid governance' (Geenen 2016).

In the broader issues of responsibility when mines damage the environment and the obligations of a mine to a community, corporations typically seek to limit their responsibility in mining encounters. When accidents take lives or ruin the environment, for instances, stakeholders in a mining encounter may engage in processes of 'responsibilisation' (Trnka & Trundle 2017). Mining companies sometimes follow the same pattern of 'spill, study, and stall' that is reported for the chemical industry (Ross & Amter 2010, Kirsch 2014). The extensive use of contractors and subcontractors often functions to diffuse responsibility (Gardner 2016).

The bureaucratic organization of corporations also contains several mechanisms to diffuse responsibility and keep individuals from being blamed for failures (Jackall 2009). For example, who counts as a representative of 'the mine' or 'the government' or 'the community' at any given time is a quite complex question. Corporations are not human beings writ large. Rather, they are both forums in which individual action occurs as well as corporate entities which people can claim to speak for on certain occasions (Welker 2014, Golub 2014, Shever 2012). As a result, it is easy for corporations to blame individual employees or subcontractors for misdeeds. The division of labour enables executives to avoid knowledge of unethical behaviour, while employees lower down can claim that they are acting on orders. Ethnographies of corporate elites reveal that in some cases they are not evil people driven by avarice and indifference to suffering. Rather, they believe themselves to be ethical even when they are part of a social process which has iniquitous outcomes (Butler 2015, Golub 2013).

Today, mining corporations are heavily invested in 'corporate social responsibility' (CSR), the idea that companies ought to orient not just to profits but also to environmental stewardship and community development as well. Anthropologists who study CSR (Dolan & Rajak 2016, Rajak 2011, Walker-Said & Kelly 2015) argue that CSR limits corporate responsibility by defining what companies are and are not responsible for. Anthropologists are thus critical of the way CSR can become a tool for avoiding responsibility.

Downsides to mining: violent conflict and the resource curse

Mineral wealth is not an unqualified good. The 'resource curse', a tendency for resource-rich areas to develop more slowly and suffer corruption, often occurs in mining areas (Auty 1993, Gilberthorpe & Rajak 2017). Boom economies can crash, leaving people and regions longing for the days of increased but impermanent wealth (Ferguson 1999). While some individuals may do very well out of mining, communities and regions often struggle to turn mining activities, even if they last decades, into a robust, diverse, and sustainable economy.

Mining can lead to conflict and violence. Local communities often organise to oppose large-scale mining, and this opposition can lead to armed resistance, as in Appalachian opposition to coal companies (Andrews 2010) or even civil war, in the case of the Bougainville civil war in Papua New Guinea (Laslett 2014). In other instances, such as in Sierra Leone, civil wars can be prolonged as disputants in a conflict use mineral revenue to fund their operations (Richards 1996, Le Billon 2014). Security forces at large-scale mines have also been known to engage in violence against local communities, sometimes in coordination with the police or military, violating human rights (Coumans 2017).

Buying and selling minerals

Anthropologists do not just study the lives of miners and the dynamics of mining encounters; they also analyse how these minerals enter the marketplace once they have been extracted. Artisanal miners trying to bring their product to market encounter entities and ideas like 'the world market' which buyers use to justify their prices (Smith 2015), and miners often speculate about their own role in the global system. Some miners — like many first-world consumers — may not even know the precise use to which their coltan or tantalum will be put. Judging the value of diamonds and coloured gemstones requires expertise which buyers claim a monopoly on, and which sellers often contest (Calvão 2015).

Once received, the money earned from mining is often seen to be 'hot', 'fast', or 'loose' (Walsh 2003), difficult to save and suitable for spending on luxury goods or indulgences. In mining for some minerals, such as diamonds, luck plays a large role, and mining is equated with gambling, or viewed in religious terms, in that success seems to be granted by god or other supernatural forces (D'Angelo 2015). Often, mining-derived money is spent on alcohol or luxury goods in order to bolster miners’ perceptions of themselves as daring and exciting, as frequently happens when they are young men (Werthmann 2008). Filip De Boeck has showed how Angolan youths from rural areas use money from diamond smuggling to live in the city, reversing typical narratives of modernization in which rural people are second rate (1998).

Diamonds and coloured gemstones are smaller and lighter than commodity metals like gold or silver, and expertise is needed to value them. In fact, Ferry has shown that financial markets value gold because of its homogenous physical qualities, which her respondents say makes it a culture-free source of value (Ferry 2016). In fact, Anna Tsing has shown that mines can make profits without mining at all, by merely creating at the appearance of mining which appeals to first-world investors (Tsing 2000). At any rate, buyers of precious and semi-precious stones need strong personal connections and trust to sell them. Many anthropologists have studied how coloured gemstones and diamonds circulate amongst diasporic ethnic (Marsden 2016) or religious networks such as the Jewish diamond traders (Shield 2002) or Jain emerald traders (Babb 2013, Brazeal 2017): such traders move stones across international borders, grade them, and trade them relying on the trust created by their kinship and religious connections. In other cases, companies attempt to create rigorous grading standards in rationally organised shops in order to avoid the vagaries of idiosyncratic grading (Cross 2011, Bell 2017), creating workplaces employees sometimes find stifling.

In fact, there are several forces at work today which conspire to standardise and routinise the valuation and marketing of minerals. In some cases, people use certification and testing processes to establish differences between substances that can appear identical to human senses. Stones such as sapphires and diamonds (or imitation diamonds) can be relatively cheaply manufactured in a lab. Sapphires and rubies, once mined, can be cooked and altered chemically to become more beautiful. As a result, sapphire sellers use various forms of licensing and branding to ensure that 'natural' sapphires maintain their value in the face of other cheaper, but physically identical, competitors (Walsh 2010). For almost twenty years, NGOs have attempted to raise awareness of the inequities and violence of the mining industry, perhaps most successfully in the 2006 film Blood Diamonds. As a result, there are many attempts to distinguish and to value 'fair trade', 'conflict free', or 'ethical' minerals over those of unknown provenance (Oakley 2015, Fischer 2018).

The ethics of studying mining

As we have seen, mining is an activity that can have serious consequences, providing massive wealth but also resulting in environmental destruction and, sometimes, conflict and violence that destroy communities and ruin lives. As a result, many anthropologists have been satisfied with studying mining disinterestedly. Some anthropologists have done applied work, giving aid to mining companies and governments and providing expert advice, which they hope will prevent these stakeholders from making bad decisions (Goldman 2000, Cochrane 2017). Anthropologists have also chosen a form of 'engaged anthropology' (Kirsch 2018), forming alliances with local and indigenous people to oppose mining and taking up activist roles (Kirsch 2014, Jalbert et al. 2017). Still others have argued for an intermediate position, contending that an 'ombudsman' role as a middleman would suit anthropologists better (Golub 2013, Filer 1999). Anthropologists on different sides of these issues can often be very critical of each other's work (Bainton & Owen 2018).

In a reflexive twist, scholars have even studied the anthropology of mining itself. Activist scholars have criticised the role of anthropologists in mining encounters (Coumans 2011). James Ferguson (1999) has explored the way that the Manchester school ethnography of the Zambian Copperbelt was part of social context in which mining developed, not just an objective source of knowledge that stood outside of it.

Conclusion: future directions

There are many future forms that an anthropology of mining could take. Mining itself will likely move in several new directions, many of which are being studied by anthropologists and other scholars. As stocks decline, industry will search for resources in new locations. Growing 'south-to-south' connections, such as Chinese investment in Africa, will likely be a topic of increasing interest. Asteroid mining (Pelton 2017), while still almost entirely speculative, is in fact a topic of discussion and may in the future connect the study of mining to the anthropology of outer space (Messeri 2016). Closer on the horizon is Deep Sea Mining (DSM), in which mineral-rich nodules on the seafloor are harvested through a mixture of hydraulics, robotics, and surface-level vessels. Who owns the seafloor and how do DSM companies get a 'social license to operate' (Filer & Gabriel 2018)? What role will DSM play for small island nations (Pulu 2013, Le Meur et al. 2016)? These classic questions are being asked in this new, aquatic context (Koshinsky 2018).

Broader economic and technological changes may also affect the study of mining. Many in the global community strive today for a 'circular economy' in which extraction of new minerals is reduced or halted altogether. This is raising interest in urban mining, such as the harvesting of recyclables from waste dumps and other locations (Cossu & Williams 2015). As a result, the anthropology of mining may connect with the anthropology of waste (Reno 2015) and discard studies more generally. Moreover, robotics is set to alter the future of work in many fields, including mining. Robots could, in theory, be cheaper and more efficient for companies to employ than humans. It is also preferable to use them in dangerous situations which could endanger the lives of people. This is just one example of how new technologies could change the mining industry in ways worthy of study (Keenan, Kemp & Owen 2019).

Lastly, it may be that 'the anthropology' of mining as a field dissolves or at least loses some of its coherence as our understanding of the social and semiotic processes surrounding mining increases. Corporate mining features social dynamics that have more in common with those found in the anthropology of the state, bureaucracy, and hydrocarbons than with some of the research on artisanal mining. Artisanal mining focuses on grassroots development and labour in a way that studies of large-scale mines do not. The issues of materiality and trading that are central in the literature on gemstones separate it from studies of commodity metals such as copper. It may also be the case that in the future, anthropologists will be able to isolate and study social dynamics across several domains, regardless of whether those dynamics occur in mining or other areas. This development would represent a maturation in the theoretical frameworks used within the discipline.

Regardless, it is incontestable that mining will remain central to important topics in contemporary politics and economy. For this reason, there is no doubt that the growing field of the anthropology of mining will be a vital and important part of scholarship in the years to come.

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Note on contributor

Alex Golub is an associate professor of anthropology at the University of Hawai‘i at Mānoa. He studies the Porgera gold mine in Papua New Guinea. His book, Leviathans at the gold mine: creating indigenous and corporate actors in Papua New Guinea (2014, Duke University Press), won the 2015 Book Prize from the Association for Political and Legal Anthropology.

Prof. Alex Golub, Department of Social Anthropology, College of Social Sciences, University of Hawai‘i at Mānoa, 2424 Maile Way, Saunders Hall 346 Honolulu, HI 96822, United States. golub@hawaii.edu

Digital anthropology

Felix Stein — Tue, 28 Aug 2018 13:53:10 +0000

Daniel Miller

University College London

Initially published 28 Aug 2018

http://doi.org/10.29164/18digital

Abstract:

‘The digital’ is defined here as new technologies that are ultimately reducible to binary code. These have made many cultural artefacts easier and quicker to both reproduce and to share. The first section of this entry is concerned with populations and worlds that are largely the result of digital technologies. The second section examines the more general use and consequences of digital technologies on diverse populations around the world. Rather than separating off the impact of digital technologies, a major contribution of anthropology has been through holistic ethnography, which demonstrates that we can only understand new digital worlds in the context of wider social relations and practices. Rather than trying to adjudicate digital technologies as positive or negative, anthropology may also focus upon their inherent contradictions. A third section examines the way digital technologies impact anthropological methodology. In the final section the concern is with the impact digital anthropology may have on our conception of anthropology itself and what it means to be human.

Introduction

On almost any day one can find newspaper articles which tell us we have lost our humanity to smartphone or selfie addiction, or why we should be anxious about how artificial intelligence will replace our labour, or how algorithms reduce our selves to mere data. Sometimes there is a counter-narrative that new technologies can solve all health problems or prevent the catastrophic consequences of climate change. In short, akin with political anthropology, digital anthropology is an arena within which developments are constantly used to make larger normative and ethical arguments rather than merely observe and account for the consequences of technological change.

Anthropology as a discipline began with the study of small-scale societies, regarded as traditional or customary and often wrongly assumed to change slowly, if at all. By contrast, most people regarded the advent of digital technologies as a kind of speeding up of the world, a rather breathless and unrelenting deluge of the new. So an anthropology that is tasked with encompassing and understanding the digital world is perhaps also the final repudiation of that initial illusion that there have ever been societies outside of trajectories of change. It may grant us a more balanced or rounded discipline that is equally concerned with the entire gamut of human experience.

At the same time, rather than being merely a tool in debates over whether digital technologies have good or bad consequences, anthropology has retained its holistic methodology. It is therefore the discipline most likely to situate new technologies within a much wider cultural and social context and thereby appreciate the inherent contradictions and complexities that emerge from the larger study of their use and consequence. Ethnography will show how digital technologies produce both new possibilities for political activism and also for state oppression, creating conditions for the commodification of music and other media and the de-commodification of those same media simultaneously.

The term ‘digital anthropology’ can be used to refer to the consequences of the rise of digital technologies for particular populations, the use of these technologies within anthropological methodology, or the study of specific digital technologies. But the topic may also raise wider questions about the nature of contemporary anthropology itself, both what it now means to be human and how anthropology as a discipline should incorporate worlds that were neither precedented nor possible in the past. This essay will begin with the question of what we mean by ‘the digital’. It then divides the consequences of these technologies into three parts. The first consists of the study of the technologies themselves, via the populations specifically associated with them such as hackers. The discussion then moves to the more general assessment of increasingly ubiquitous digital technologies such as social media upon ordinary populations through traditional ethnographic fieldwork. A third section examines the uses of digital technologies for anthropological methodology. The final section will turn to the larger questions of the implications for the nature of anthropology and humanity.

What is ‘the digital’?

No attempt to define ‘the digital’ should go unchallenged. The definition that will be used for the purposes of this essay will be everything that can be reduced to the outcome of binary coding (Miller & Horst 2012). There are several alternatives. Some might focus more on the rise of cybernetic systems,^[1] while others concentrate upon a separate online world termed ‘virtual’ (e.g. Boellstorff, Nardi, Pearce & Taylor 2012). The reason for choosing a definition based upon binary coding for this entry partly lies in its simplicity. It also has the virtue of highlighting certain key implications. These are firstly that digital technologies made it easier to create products that are completely identical and can therefore be easily reproduced. Secondly, that digital forms are much easier to share. These two properties in turn account for what appears to be a rapid and constant proliferation of new technologies and subsequent products, some of which become ubiquitous and scale up to reach most of the world population in a very short time. So, almost every year the focus of both popular and academic attention is on something different – the internet, search engines, the virtual, social media, big data, artificial intelligence, Tinder, the internet of things, and so forth.

One approach to digital anthropology developed out of material culture studies, which focused as much upon how things make people as with how people make things. We understand who we are in the mirror of a material world within which we are born and socialised. But this world was never static. One way in which culture itself became more diverse and expansive was through the explosion of material products we associate with consumer culture. This has now been extended by the further dynamism and diversity found in digital forms. It is therefore important to remember that while the digital world may often be online, it is not immaterial. There is a material side to the world of ‘bits’ (Blanchette 2011), computers, memes, platforms, digital photography, or digital money.

So, the digital is not an abstraction but rather the creation of a plethora of quite concrete forms and processes. Furthermore, these are always encountered in the context of their use and consequences for some particular population, which means they become subject to cultural differentiation. The studies of social media referenced below reveal how the Chinese internet, where free instant messaging services such as QQ and WeChat focus upon avatars and hierarchies of users, is not the same as a Brazilian internet, with its emphasis upon political memes and gender relations. In one region we find an internet that constantly debates which digital forms are compatible with Islam, in another the concern will be on how the internet can be employed in mobilising feminist protests such as #MeToo, or how to prevent it from turning people into data which could be harvested. The development of coding allowed for new forms of sharing, not just of products, but also through what is termed ‘Open Source’; that is, the collaborative development of code itself. This has, in some regions, become a model for new political ideals (Kelty 2008). In Italy, the populist Five Star Movement, which advocates direct democracy through the internet, became in the 2018 election the largest political party in Italy. In turn, digital tools lead to new forms of surveillance and control that were previously unimaginable. Seen from an anthropological perspective, it is the diversity and contradictions of the internet that become prominent.

Digital anthropology therefore has to contend with the way culture itself has grown in scale and form, including new dreams and new nightmares about who we are becoming, and who or what should be regarded as modern or traditional. For the anthropologist, the digital is always approached in context. If biometrics in India seem to provide better access to welfare benefits, or in China to new forms of citizen control, this is because of political choices as to how they will be used. What biometrics as a whole represents is simply the increasing capacities of vast data banks sourced from people that can then be exploited in numerous ways.

Some newish worlds

The term ‘newish’, rather than new, is important here, since there is no clear divide between unprecedented worlds developed through digital technologies and the gradual transformation of the rest of life as they are impacted by these same technologies. Indeed one of the main trajectories in the development of digital anthropology has been through the previously established anthropology of media. This is a field in which we can all easily follow the gradual transformation of media into a largely digital form. Most of us will now watch what we still call television, but may be increasingly encountered through a variety of screens, including our phones. We can see how newspapers are being challenged by other forms of news dissemination, which brings ambiguity and precarity to those who would call themselves journalists. All of this has led to a corresponding shift in the anthropology of media (Pertierra 2017). While there is no absolute or clear division, it may still be worth drawing a contrast between ‘newish’ worlds, which largely could not have existed but for the development of digital technologies, as against the study of the use and consequences of digital technologies by ordinary people.

Digital technologies have given rise to a wide assortment of new populations that may at first appear quite alien. One role of the anthropologist has been to empathetically engage with those populations in order to help us understand both what they do and how to understand the world from their perspective. A pioneer of such work has been Gabriella Coleman (2012, 2014) through her long-term engagements first with hackers and then groups such as Anonymous who have come to occupy political or alternative niches that have been enabled by these new technologies. Her work helps shift our understanding of these groups from mere caricature to having a sense of their own internal debates over how they should or should not intervene politically. In a similar vein, Jenna Burrell (2012) worked with West Africans who became scammers. She was able to balance the focus upon the victims they had fleeced with the conditions of exclusion and poverty that often characterised the situation of the perpetrators of such actions and help us see the world from their point of view.

These hackers and scammers exploit niches created by new digital technologies without which they would not exist. More commonly, digital developments extend trends and possibilities that were already present; for example, through changing the infrastructure behind labour markets. In this instance the new technologies are thought to extend still further a long trajectory by which human agency is suppressed by the increasing sophistication of machines and powerful interests, generally understood as neo-liberal capitalism. An early debate about how digital technologies had extended transnational labour was over whether there was a practice of ‘gold farming’ where Chinese workers intensively played computer games to win treasures that were then sold on to less assiduous game players in other countries (Nardi & Kow 2010). More recently we have witnessed the rise of what is now called the ‘gig’ economy, digital technologies, such as smartphone apps, have blurred the boundaries and responsibilities of companies in relation to workers. Ilana Gershon (2017) examined the implications of the career-focused online network LinkedIn as a site where workers now have to perform particular appearances and claims in order to obtain work. She uses this example to show how digital platforms can turn neo-liberal political philosophies not just into new forms of work, but also new ways in which we visualise and understand ourselves as individuals as we craft the way we present ourselves to the world within the dictates of this platform.

Digital technologies have also drastically transformed the time and space of working practices. For example, a vast business complex near Chennai in South India has three periods of rush hour as call centre workers come in to serve markets in Asia, Europe, and North America, respectively (Ventkatraman 2017). There are also digital nomads who can carry out their paid work from almost anywhere. Digital technologies have caused the collapse of many traditional businesses and ways of working. Perhaps the most forceful example of how an anthropologist can convey the way human beings may become, in effect, an extension of the digital machine has been Natasha Schüll’s (2012) careful dissection of the new mechanisms that have transformed slot machines in Las Vegas through increasingly perfected technologies whose sole purpose is keeping people addicted to gambling. Not all these studies focus on the furtherance of oppressive forces. Thomas Malaby (2009), for example, in contrast to Schüll, examines the role of contingency and liberal fantasies that may emerge in the construction of game platforms, using the example of Linden Lab in creating Second Life.

Given their more holistic methods and perspectives, anthropologists are more likely than those in the media or political studies to present digital developments as contradictory. For example, rather than merely dismissing the rise of social media as against more traditional forms of news reporting, they are more likely to investigate particular examples of the use of social media for the dissemination of information (e.g. Chua 2018). Music reveals a constantly changing dynamic, including decommodification (e.g. Spotify), new modes of collaboration for musicians (see, for example, Haworth & Born 2016), and ways they interact with the public (e.g. MySpace).

Another way anthropologists have engaged with these newish worlds is by focusing upon specific digital platforms and their usages. An example is Patricia Lange’s (2014) work on how young people create material for YouTube. There is also Michael Wesch’s influential visual presentation An Anthropological Introduction to YouTube. Jamie Coates (2017) provides an anthropological perspective on the phenomenon of images and ideas going ‘viral’, as in the cases of the rapid spread of memes. Other media may themselves become the vehicles for the rapid acceptance of assumptions about how, for example, we are supposed to be prone to fake news or to live within political echo chambers where we only hear similar views to our own. By contrast, ethnographic work provides a much more nuanced sense of what people actually believe and why. This is partly because other disciplines mostly depend upon analysis based only on publicly available data such as Twitter, while ethnographers gain access to more private and often more consequential and intimate discussion on, for example, WhatsApp.

Communication media represent an arena where it is generally accepted that the digital has almost entirely transformed the landscape. But anthropologists have recognised equally significant transformations in many other fields; for example, that of money. The impact is vast. We can focus on the way finance capitalism exploded into greater fields of scale and abstraction following the technological developments which created the ‘big bang’ of 1986, and the further increasing use of digital technologies that lead to still greater volatility in capital markets that contributed to the 2008 collapse of those markets. At one end of this spectrum are the new abstractions of money represented by purely digital mechanisms, such as a ‘blockchain’, that can produce new currencies such as Bitcoin. At the other end is the way mobile-phone-based money systems such as M-Pesa have led to the enfranchisement of populations in Kenya and elsewhere who were previously excluded from banking and micro-finance. Here an exemplary anthropologist is Bill Maurer (2015) who has tried to consider the entire spectrum of these new forms of money and payment and their often contradictory consequences. Maurer argues that rather than seeing these consequences in isolation, we should come to regard different forms of money more as a repertoire or scale, which in turn reflects the scales of sociality that have been uncovered in studies of social media.

This section began with examples that are relatively autonomous, being created entirely by digital technologies. But we have gradually shifted to newish worlds of digital media and digital money that are more hybrid extensions to prior forms. By this criteria, most of the infrastructure of our contemporary world is newish. Does the vision of Open Source provide for new models of urban development, since, as with Wikipedia, it has demonstrated the viability of a much more democratic and open politics of creation (Jiménez 2014)? It is hard to imagine design today outside of digitization (Gunn, Otto & Smith 2013), while our sense of place has been transformed by new locational technologies such as GPS, Google Earth and mobile phones. Are digital forms challenging and extending the traditional relationship between museums, art galleries, and objects (Geismar 2018)? What about the enablement of new forms of transport such as driverless cars, new capacities in digital design, or 3D manufacture? These are just some of the fields in which digital technologies have proved transformational (Horst & Miller 2012).

Everyday digital life

The previous section examined groups that exist entirely as a result of digital developments and the wider impact of the digital upon the forms and infrastructures within which we live. By contrast, there is another clear responsibility for digital anthropology to observe and account for the consequences of all these developments upon the everyday lives of ordinary people around the world. This brings us back to a core component of anthropology: traditional holistic ethnography, in which we try to understand how people relate to everything that bears upon their lives. Nobody lives just online, so to understand their involvement with digital technologies we continue to focus on the wider context of their non-digital lives. Since these are general ethnographies of populations, the emphasis will also be on those forms of digital culture that have become more ubiquitous, such as social media and smartphones.

One of the key contributions of anthropology is to counter the constant claims made about the impact of digital technologies that come from more universalising disciplines such as psychology and internet studies. Because their model is the natural sciences, they may experiment with a proximate population, such as US college students, and then extrapolate their results more broadly. We are then told that new digital media has an impact upon attention span and possibly our brains, or that young people are confused as to what a real friend is. By contrast, anthropologists are committed to an inclusive understanding of the modern world that recognises that we need to be equally aware of populations in Africa, East and South Asia, and Latin America, and to be wary of generalizations that are not based on in-depth comparative studies.

What, for example, is the impact of digital communication technologies on Filipino women who migrate to care for children and the elderly across many regions? An appraisal may include studies of how the populations that remain within the Philippines use social networking platforms such as Friendster and, more recently, Facebook, to keep in touch with those who have gone abroad, but also how this now-global population of migrant workers use new media to retain a sense of Filipino sociality that can mitigate the separation of physical location by creating a more integrated online sphere (McKay 2016: 51-69). Many of these migrants are mothers who left behind their children to be brought up in the Philippines. As the internet replaced letter writing, this radically transformed the communications between mothers and children, from exchanges that could take months to constant daily interaction. Mothers and their children often had quite different views as to what these changes meant for transnational motherhood (Madianou & Miller 2012).

Instead of making universal generalizations, anthropologists may also demonstrate that in some places new phenomena such as social media have had relatively limited impact. For example, in Southern Italy, a place with a flourishing public sphere of people meeting each other around the town squares, there was relatively limited interest in social media (Nicolescu 2016). At the other extreme are the extraordinary findings of Xinyuan Wang (2016) who lived for 15 months inside one of the new Chinese factories that, as a whole, employs some 250 million people who have migrated from rural areas into this industrial sector. Social media has, in effect, become the place in which they now live. Rather than using social media to reconnect with their rural villages as had been anticipated, they use it as a more effective migration into the world of modern urban China than the move to the factory itself. Apart from eating, working, and sleeping, and interacting relatively little with their fellow workers, it is social media such as QQ and WeChat where they spend their leisure time, cultivating a sense of themselves as fully part of modern China and its consumer culture: something that the migration to the factory in itself had failed to achieve. It is often the Chinese digital developments that have both more extensive platform capacities and deeper penetration into the lives of their users than platforms such as Facebook or Twitter.

In the study of digital technologies there is a tendency to focus upon the more unprecedented or spectacular consequences. But, as in the example of the Filipino diaspora, anthropologists will pay attention just as much to what might be considered the more conservative consequences of digital technologies - in that case, bringing families back together online that have been fragmented offline by global migration. In a similar fashion, Elisabetta Costa has shown how Kurdish people reconstruct their traditional lineage organization when the families themselves have become dispersed as a result of decades of conflict in Eastern Turkey (2016). The value of ethnography is demonstrated in that in all these cases we find an appreciation that online activity can only be understood relative to changes that have taken place offline.

The area that has perhaps received most attention is political anthropology, because digital technologies are often seen in popular discussion as the ‘cause’ of contemporary political transformations. Thus, there is currently intense interest in ideas such as whether Facebook is responsible for the rapid spread of hate speech, such as anti-Rohinga sentiments in Myanmar; whether the Trump presidency is partly a product of Twitter as a platform; or whether a company called Cambridge Analytica employed these technologies to alter the results of elections by carefully and secretly targeting voters. Once again, the role of anthropologists is to contest assertions that are made about these political impacts through more long term and contextual considerations. For example, John Postill (2008) questioned debates about digital political communities, because often these make simplistic assumptions about the prevalence of prior offline communities. If we ask, ‘is this online forum a real community?’ it makes it sound as through previously everyone lived in such real communities, when actually, as Postill notes, that may not have been the case at all.

Because the appraisal of new technologies is generally moralistic, there is a constant tendency to simplify and romanticise the pre-digital world. Going against this trend, anthropologists strive to provide much more specificity to these debates. Victoria Bernal, in her study of Eritrean diaspora politics, examines a series of websites which are best understood not as expressions of national public spheres in general, but rather the very specific circumstance of Eritrean politics: a military regime that created an often unpaid army on the basis of nationalist requirements for the survival of the new nation, but which in some cases became tantamount to slavery (Bernal 2014). Bernal’s focus is on the use of online spaces to create but also to skew debate within the diaspora as to how Eritrean people should respond.

Moreover, digital anthropology tends to investigate the ways people regard each other as acting appropriately or inappropriately. The study of Filipino mothers mentioned above, for example, showed that their engagement with digital media opened up new possibilities for moral judgement. Previously, people had chosen media mainly because of cost or access. The Philippines was one of the first regions to make intensive use of text messaging because it was free. Today, most people have phone plans or internet plans, so there is no cost implication behind which communication is selected. The result is that media has become more integrated into social and moral concerns. Nowadays, a person is judged by the fact that they dumped their boyfriend by WhatsApp instead of by phone (Gershon 2010). People in several different regions also avoid discussion of politics on social media because it is divisive and other people let them know this is the case.

Establishing a moral framework as to what constitutes appropriate behaviour online leads to the more general question: how is the normative established? Especially when, for online activity, this seems to develop within months or weeks, as in the use of new platforms such as Snapchat or Line.^[2]Each of these platforms grew through an emphasis on some particular trait, such as the ability for images to self-destruct after ten seconds, or to add a plethora of visual abstractions and animations, capacities which are often then copied by rivals and become taken for granted. So, an important part of digital anthropology is observing and accounting for the rapid manifestation of new normative principles involved in these new forms of communication. For example, the way phones are used to establish what can and cannot be talked about in the Congo or Mozambique (Archambault 2017, Pype 2016). Examining the use of social media worldwide, it became apparent that the meme has developed as just such a mechanism for establishing the normative. Even people with very limited literacy can easily share a meme that expresses their moral views about good or bad behaviour (Miller et al. 2016: 172-3).

There is also obvious depth gained by developing long-term fieldwork, as in the extended study of mobile phone technologies in a Bengali village (Tenhunen 2018), since normativity today is not so much established as it is continually changing along with the ever-changing technologies. Historically, anthropologists have assumed that the main force behind the normative was the depth of tradition: what people in many places refer to as their customs. Digital anthropology, dealing with rapid change, represents a striking contrast. As such, what does digital anthropology imply for what anthropology and indeed humanity is now becoming? This will be the subject of the final section.

How we do anthropology digitally

The study of digital anthropology has already gone through several iterations. An earlier review concentrated on the exploration of online communities (Wilson & Peterson 2002), while a later review focused more on the ethnographic approach to digital media (Coleman 2010). A more recent edited collection (Horst & Miller 2012) examined the variety of fields of study, ranging from location to politics to domestic life, as well as the implications for theory and anthropology more generally. It is hard, however, to separate this sequence from developments in methodology, which have also arisen in response to new possibilities created through digital technologies. For example, ethnography often consisted of researching and describing a bounded space and time, where exit from the field site meant the end of the anthropologist’s relationships with their informants. But, with social media, the people anthropologists work amongst expect to retain those relationships over distance and subsequent to the completion of the ethnography, which is consequently harder to delineate.

Many new sources of information are now online and anthropologists may replace their traditional notebooks with devices such as voice recording, cutting and pasting from digital sources, or shared files (Sanjek & Tratner 2015). With these new mechanisms for recording and analyzing information, digital ethnography needs to be considered alongside the ethnography of the digital (Pink et al. 2016). It may be useful to think about these changes as part of much wider methodological debates. For example, Sarah Pink had previously argued for more attention to be given to the senses or to visual media, parallel to still earlier influences from phenomenology that implied that experience is something that has to be viewed from the interaction between our bodies and our environments.

This critical assessment of digital ethnography is all the more important since other disciplines have increasingly embraced ethnography as a means of linking the study of new digital technologies with an assessment of their consequences for populations. For example, STS (Science and Technology Studies) has provided several insightful ethnographies of the use of digital technologies of care (Oudshoorn 2011; Pols 2012). These have the virtue of considering not just medics and patients but also new forms of labour, such as data processors, who are often one of the hidden consequences of such technologies. They thereby link equally well to studies in medical anthropology and digital anthropology.

Within the field of digital anthropology, there is a more specific focus upon virtual ethnography, where anthropologists study online worlds and encounters in addition to conventional field sites. The key exemplar of this approach was Tom Boellstorff’s ethnography of the online computer game Second Life, a study that retains many of the characteristics of traditional ethnography but applied to an entirely online world (Boellstorff 2008). He shows, for example, how many of the disputes over property ownership and between neighbours online echo those familiar from traditional offline contexts. Many examples can be found within what are often substantial gaming communities such as World of Warcraft (Nardi 2010). Several of the anthropologists involved have provided textbook examples on how to engage in such virtual world studies (Boellstorff et al. 2012), examining, for example, some of the difficult ethical issues of observing peoples’ behaviours who one might not otherwise know or be able to obtain consent from. Others have looked to use digital technology to find a balance between online and offline that reflect the lives of their informants. For example, they have studied migrants who have become dispersed worldwide but who try to re-integrate their families online (Landzelius 2006).

Digital technologies can also enhance anthropologists’ involvement in the dissemination of their research results. The Why we post project (Miller et al. 2016) created a spectrum of short, highly accessible forms such as YouTube films under five minutes, social media activity, blogging, and a free online university course (MOOC).^[3] By making anthropological work freely available online in the languages of our field sites, even traditional ethnographic monographs can become very popular indeed, with that particular project reaching half a million downloads by 2018. These developments in free access mean that anthropological research can be more easily returned back to the often low-income societies that tend to be the subject of much of our research. This is true also for popular online anthropological magazines such as Sapiens^[4] and journals such as Cultural Anthropology.^[5]

Changing humanity

The first two sections represent a contrast. One dealt with relatively new worlds created through the digital, and the other with the more general consequences for peoples whose lives are not especially digitally inflected. The distinction was important partly because they are likely to lead to different conclusions. For example, currently one of the major developing interests within digital anthropology concerns the potential impact of the collection of vast amounts of data, their use in the construction of algorithms, and more generally the massive investments in artificial intelligence (e.g. Kockelman 2013). An example of one anthropological response to these interests is Minna Ruckenstein and Natasha Schüll’s (2016) survey of the ‘datafication’ of health. The emphasis is mostly negative. Data is regarded as at least analogous to the tradition role of capital, creating the conditions for more targeted commodification and new forms of power. Datafication gives unprecedented capacities for surveillance and control which not only predict, but also shape and modify human behaviour. There is also a sense of dehumanization where people come to see themselves more as visualizations of data, rather than simply as persons. Furthermore, these technologies reinforce given differences in gender and other unequal social parameters. As in the previous examples of digitally created worlds, the main emphasis is on groups that have been constructed around these new possibilities, such as people who identify with the Quantified Self movement^[6]and engage in various forms of self-tracking. An alternative focus is the active refusal of such technologies which may now be seen as a form of resistance.

By contrast, the studies discussed under the title of everyday digital life concern populations that either do not particularly embrace or refuse digital technologies, but rather simply accept them rapidly as normative within their daily life. Mostly people engage with the latest digital technologies as smartphone apps. For them, artificial intelligence and algorithms are experienced as, for example, more effective instant foreign language translation services, more effective GPS navigation, or more accurate voice dictation. Far from dehumanising, they see their phone as increasingly aligned with their particular personality and tend to feel bereft if by chance they have accidently left their digital companion at home. They are far more concerned with surveillance by their families than that by companies. With regard to health issues, they are more likely to welcome the degree to which the inside of their own bodies, which previously were largely unknown to them except when they erupted in disease, are now knowable as data. They may pay attention to apps that count their steps, or predict their menstrual periods, and use these for developing healthier or more planned lifestyles.

So, where does all this leave digital anthropology? Modern holistic digital anthropology should strive to combine the best of both these approaches. Ethnography may be employed in the direct study of corporations and states, and alert us to data gathering and subsequent usage. Studies of ordinary populations ensure that we are able to appraise the consequences of artificial intelligence and algorithms through studies of what people actually do on a regular basis with the apps that employ them. Those that focus upon digital practitioners help us appreciate the wider infrastructure of states and corporations and the potential for more malign consequences. The first conclusion is therefore that we need both kinds of research and both sides of these arguments: an attention to vast forces that may be oppressive, and the equal commitment to intimate and empathetic engagement with ordinary people that respects their views and experiences as authentic. The second conclusion is that the anthropological commitment is based on long-term scholarship, which may include the study of moralistic debates around these issues but as a way to understand them and account for them, rather than simply to affirm the anthropologists’ own ideological stance. Thirdly, anthropology should be the discipline that encompasses contradiction and recognises that in almost every instance, the new digital technologies raise new possibilities for both benign and malign consequences, which are usually two sides of the same coin.

Even prior to the rise of digital technologies, anthropologists such as Donna Haraway and Marilyn Strathern had raised profound questions about how other developments, such as those in reproductive technologies, impact upon questions of what it now means to be human. As noted above, one major concern has been with the potentially dehumanising effect of new digital technologies such as artificial intelligence. The anthropomorphism represented by the science fiction robot is now finally coming into being. In Japan, where there is a very high proportion of elderly people, a key interest has been in the development of robots that can then take ‘care’ of the elderly, incidentally potentially replacing those Filipina caregivers discussed above (Wright 2018). Similarly, the smartphone was referred to earlier as a digital companion: a phone looks much less like a person than a robot, but it may already show still greater scope for a more subtle anthropomorphism. On the one hand, corporations develop artificial intelligence, algorithms, and chatbots and provide digital assistants with names such as Siri and Alexa, which suggests this anthropomorphism is coming from digital innovation. But at the same time, the owner of a smartphone may ignore the built-in apps, and may instead download others, which they then reconfigure so that their phone is anthropomorphic by way of expressing their particular personality: as a highly organised administrator, a creative artist, or a rugged male who can claim all his usage of the phone is based on necessity.

All of the above suggests that perhaps the real problem here lies with the very term ‘humanity’. Could this be too conservative, since conventionally it refers to everything humanity has been up to now, but not all those things humanity may in time become (Miller & Sinanan 2014: 15-20)? Humanity might once have been defined as beings that could not fly, but then came the aeroplane. Instead of using terms such as post-human or trans-human, we might want to define humanity as including a latency that is achieved by each new technology. The concluding point is that digital anthropology, which can include the study of both use and consequence, is thereby as much a study of what people are becoming as what technologies are becoming. We now face an extreme contrast between anthropology’s initial interest in custom and tradition, compared to the speed of contemporary developments. At the same time, these may be just as expressive of persistent anthropological concerns, such as the nature of normativity. Furthermore, the speed of change makes a still stronger case for the role of long-term ethnographic studies that are prepared to encompass the complexity and contradictions that are intrinsic to an assessment of our new digital worlds. It seems reasonable therefore to also use digital anthropology to engage in debates about both what humanity is becoming and what anthropology is becoming.

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Mckay, D. 2016. An archipelago of care: Filipino migrants and global networks. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.

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——— & J. Sinanan 2014. Webcam. Cambridge: Polity.

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——— 2010. My life as a Night Elf Priest: an anthropological account of World of Warcraft. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press.

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Note on contributor

Daniel Miller is Professor of Anthropology at the Department of Anthropology, University College London. He is author/editor of thirty-nine books mainly concerned with the study of material culture, consumption, and digital anthropology. He has conducted fieldwork in India, Ireland, Philippines, Solomon Islands, Trinidad, and the United Kingdom.

Professor Daniel Miller, UCL Anthropology, University College London, 14 Taviton Street, London WC1H 0BW, United Kingdom. d.miller@ucl.ac.uk. @DannyAnth.

[1] These are systems that both provide and then act upon positive and negative feedback.

[2] Snapchat is a picture-based messaging service. Line is another messaging service that strongly emphasises visual content.

[3] Why we post: social media through the eyes of the world. University College London (available on-line: https://www.ucl.ac.uk/why-we-post?utm_source=UCL%20Press&utm_medium=UCL%20Press&utm_campaign=UCL%20Press).

[4] SAPIENS. The Wenner-Gren Foundation (available on-line: www.sapiens.org).

[5] Cultural Anthropology. The Society for Cultural Anthropology. American Anthropological Association (available on-line: www.culanth.org).

[6] The Quantified Self movement consists of people who focus upon the way their bodies and behaviours are increasingly visible as externalised and quantified data.